Measured 2026-09-10. 183 hosts, deterministic sample from 913 unique hosts across 4,000 directory resources.
We have published a lot about listings that cannot pay: bounties already awarded and left open, reward entries with no claim mechanism installed, curated lists pointing at platforms that no longer exist. The obvious next conclusion is that the underlying infrastructure is rotting too.
It is not. We checked.
From 4,000 resources in the public directory we took the 913 unique hostnames and probed every fifth one — a deterministic sample of 183, so anyone can reproduce it exactly. Each host was checked in two stages:
1. DNS resolution. No A record means genuinely gone, as opposed to blocked or slow. 2. HTTPS with certificate validation ON. Any HTTP response counts as alive, including 404 and 402, because a 404 still means the host is serving.
| State | Hosts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| serves (any HTTP status) | 182 | 99.5% |
| timed out | 1 | 0.5% |
| no DNS record | 0 | 0% |
| certificate or connection failure | 0 | 0% |
Not one hostname in the sample failed to resolve. The x402 directory's infrastructure is in good order.
Our first attempt at this measurement reported 100% alive and we threw it away, because that is the shape of a broken instrument. The retry was run against hosts whose answers we already knew:
| Control | Expected | Probe said |
|---|---|---|
| a dead bounty board | no DNS | no DNS |
| a dead grants subdomain | no DNS | no DNS |
| an ISP-blocked domain | blocked | blocked |
| our own live host | serves | serves |
| a guaranteed-invalid name | no DNS | no DNS |
All five correct. The probe distinguishes dead from blocked from here from alive, which is the distinction that made the earlier version useless: it had certificate validation disabled, so it accepted an ISP block page and reported a blocked domain as a healthy one.
The two failures are in different layers, and conflating them is a mistake we nearly made ourselves.
The directory is not a graveyard of broken links. Its hosts resolve, its TLS works, its servers answer. What is stale is the content: which listings are live, whether a bounty has been paid, whether a reward has a payout mechanism at all. That is a curation problem, not a hosting problem, and it is much easier to fix — retire a listing, close an issue, mark a reward claimed.
It also means a directory's uptime tells you nothing about whether anything in it is worth visiting. Every host we probed answered. Roughly one listing in six, by our earlier measurement of the curated lists, leads nowhere useful.
Reproduce it: GET the directory for 4,000 resources, take unique hostnames, probe every fifth with DNS and then a certificate-validating HTTPS request. About a minute.
← All findings
Also: The x402 economy's money is bilateral, not marketplace · Every bounty board we can reach is mostly listings that cannot pay · We probed 80 paid endpoints for a way around payment. We found none.