Paddock

Agent payments have no chargeback. Paddock is pre-payment verification for AI agents.

It checks that an x402 API is real, live, and fairly priced before your agent pays it, and it measures what AI agents actually pay each other on x402 across Base and Solana.

Paddock snapshots the live agent economy, transaction volume, spend, buyers, providers, category share, and reliability, and serves it through a set of MCP tools and an HTTP API that agents can call directly, paying per query with x402 or with a subscription key.

Note on openapi.json: The openapi.json in this repository is a byte-for-byte mirror of the live specification served at paddock.finance/openapi.json, which is generated from the site's route and is the source of truth. Both declare the same info.version (currently 3.8.0); if they ever disagree, the live specification is correct and this file is stale. Use either for tool discovery and client generation.

Why agents call it

• Should I pay this endpoint right now? verify_before_pay probes the target live, checks the contract against what you expect and the seller's own published config, then adds settlement recency, the circular signal, and price versus market, before your agent authorizes a payment it cannot take back.
• Find the best live provider. Rank providers in a category by a composite of reliability (7-day success rate), reputation (unique buyers), and price, so an agent can route to the strongest option, not just the cheapest.
• Is this service still up? Per-domain liveness lookup, up/down, 7-day probe success rate, and latency, before an agent commits a paid call to a provider.
• Where's demand moving? Diff today's snapshot against a past date to see new services, retired services, category share movements, and top movers, so an agent knows where spend is shifting.

The MCP tools

Twelve tools are live, across three access tiers. get_market_summary needs no authentication at all. Five tools are covered by a free key, 10 calls per UTC day, shared across all five, issued instantly from an email address. The rest are premium: a Paddock API key, an x402/MPP per-query payment, or one free trial call per day (where noted).

Tool	Price	Description
verify_before_pay	Free key, or $0.25 USDC / query	The pre-payment check no seller can self-report. Probes the target live for its 402, checks the contract against what you expect and the seller's own published config, then adds settlement recency, the circular signal, and price versus market. Returns route true/false/inconclusive, each with dated evidence. Call this before your agent authorizes any x402 payment.
get_market_summary	Free	Current AI agent commerce market overview: total daily transaction volume, USDC spend, unique buyer agents, live service providers, and the top spending categories with their share of volume.
get_category_detail	Free key	All services in a specific category (llm, data, search, infra, content, markets, payments, comms; aliases accepted) with transaction counts, pricing, provider count, and reliability scores.
get_niche_gaps	Free key, or $0.01 USDC / query	Ranks every category by opportunity_score (high volume, few providers) with share, top-provider concentration, and an Open/Tightening/Consolidating/Mature signal. Answers "where should I build an x402 service?"
get_best_value_provider	$0.02 USDC / query	Ranks providers in one category by a composite of reliability (7-day success rate), reputation (unique buyers), and price.
get_liveness	Free key, or $0.001 USDC / query	Per-domain liveness for any domain TrustBench probes, with full probe detail: up/down (7-day probe success rate >= 0.95), score, latency p50/p95, sample count, endpoint count, and last-probe time. Reads the same nightly rollup as get_category_detail; the difference is reach and depth, not freshness, it answers for domains that have no x402 volume at all, which the category tool cannot.
get_changes	$0.10 USDC / query	Diffs today's market snapshot against a past date (up to 90 days back): new services, retired services, category share movements, and top movers.
get_circular_signal	$0.99 USDC / query	Wash/circular-settlement signal, aggregate per facilitator: cluster count, cluster volume (30d/7d), self-funding %, external-payer count, flagged share of settlement, and trend. Aggregate only, no wallet addresses or operator identity.
get_whale_activity	$0.99 USDC / query	Large settlements and movers over a window, aggregate by facilitator, category, and size band: amounts, counts, and per-category mover counts. Describes size and where, never who.
get_token_metrics	Free key, or $0.01 USDC / query	First-party chart/time-series data by metric and date range: spend share over time, daily transactions, category concentration, new services, liveness score, and the Agent Commerce Index (ACI).
get_provider_revenue	$0.99 USDC / query	Which providers earn the most over a window of daily snapshots, and how much of the market that answer can see. Attributed universe only, facilitator pass-through and circular-flagged wallets are excluded, and unresolved wallets are not dropped but surface as one explicit unattributed row (transaction share only; no dollar figure exists for them). Reports whether the recipient list was complete on every aggregated day.
get_report_data	Free metadata + $0.99 USDC / query for full data	Free metadata (title, table of contents, executive summary excerpt) at the unauthenticated /api/paddock/mcp/report-data route; full structured JSON of the monthly State of Agent Commerce report, ecosystem trends, category breakdowns, the Agent Commerce Index (ACI) with component decomposition, protocol comparison, and reliability data, via the x402-hardened /api/paddock/mcp/report-data/paid route.

The paid tools (verify_before_pay, get_niche_gaps, get_best_value_provider, get_liveness, get_changes, get_circular_signal, get_whale_activity, get_token_metrics, get_provider_revenue) each allow one free trial call per day per IP. get_report_data has no free trial on the full-data route; only its metadata is free.

get_report_data is published with two paths. The free-metadata route (/api/paddock/mcp/report-data) is declared with security: [] and is deliberately excluded from x402scan indexing; the full-data route (/api/paddock/mcp/report-data/paid) carries the x402 payment scheme. Both are visible in openapi.json.

Signed attestations

Paddock can emit a signed attestation for any pre-payment check: a portable JSON record carrying the observed payment terms, the settlement history it was checked against, the observation window, and the verdict, signed Ed25519 over an RFC 8785 canonical form. The signing key is published at a well-known path, and records verify standalone with no API access and no trust in Paddock. This is the attested-evidence format proposed for the x402 dispute-resolution extension.

• The public key path: /.well-known/paddock-attestation-key
• Verify it yourself: fetch the record, canonicalize per RFC 8785, check the Ed25519 signature against the published key.
• Live example: https://paddock.finance/a/mFxHpIcBGHR0NsmkpT8rHb0wvX_8tIr3K0xOl_4W4UY

Connecting from Claude Desktop

In Claude Desktop, open Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, then paste the Paddock MCP URL below. Claude discovers the tools automatically.

https://paddock.finance/api/mcp/mcp

The free tools work over the connector with no authentication. The paid tools work over the connector too: pass your Paddock API key as the api_key argument on the tool call and the server forwards it as the X-Paddock-Key header, billing the call against your subscription. Omit api_key to use the once-per-day free trial, or to settle the tool's USDC price via x402 pay-per-query.

Connecting from other MCP clients

Paddock exposes a standard MCP HTTP transport at the same URL: point any MCP-compatible client at it:

https://paddock.finance/api/mcp/mcp

For tool discovery, schemas, and the full route map, see openapi.json in this repository (mirrored to paddock.finance/openapi.json).

The free key

New here? Build on Paddock is the walkthrough: 60-second start, what each free tool is actually good for, five worked examples, and how to size your usage. The rest of this README is reference.

get_market_summary is open to everyone with no key, no signup, and no rate limit. It is the citation surface. If you are quoting a Paddock figure, quote it from here.

Five more tools, verify_before_pay, get_category_detail, get_niche_gaps, get_token_metrics, get_liveness, are covered by a free key. One request gets you one:

curl -X POST https://paddock.finance/api/keys/free \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"email":"you@example.com"}'

The key is returned in the response and emailed to you. Pass it as the X-Paddock-Key header, or as the api_key argument over the MCP connector.

• 10 calls per UTC day, shared across all five tools, one counter, not 10 each.
• Every successful response carries a usage object (used, limit, remaining, resets_at) so you can meter yourself.
• Over the limit returns a structured 429 naming the reset time and both paid paths.
• Premium tools are never on a free key. Calling one returns a structured 402 naming the price, and that refusal is not counted against your daily limit.

Free trial and free key are different. The free trial is 1 call per IP per day with no key at all, shared across the paid tools, a zero-friction taste, and it still works. The free key is the workflow tier above it, tied to your key rather than your IP.

Free for development and internal use. Redistribution, resale, or serving Paddock data to your end users requires a commercial license: see paddock.finance/api-access or contact hello@paddock.finance.

Pricing

Plan	Price	Limit
Keyless	Free	get_market_summary, unlimited, no key, no cap
Free key	Free	Five tools at 10 queries/day, shared, see The free key
Builder	$99/mo	10,000 queries/day
Pro Agent	$499/mo	Unlimited
x402 per-query	Pay per pull	Agent-native, no subscription, pay the per-tool USDC price at call time

The x402 per-query option is for agent-native, pay-per-pull access with no subscription: an agent settles the tool's USDC price at call time. To subscribe to Builder or Pro Agent and obtain an API key, see paddock.finance/api-access.

Authentication

Keys come in three classes and all travel the same way, in the X-Paddock-Key header: pk_free_ (free tier, five tools, 10/day shared), pk_builder_ ($99/mo) and pk_proagent_ ($499/mo). Paid tools accept a Builder or Pro Agent key; Send the key with each request and the call is billed against your subscription's daily quota. Over the MCP connector (e.g. in Claude), pass the key as the api_key tool argument instead; the server forwards it as X-Paddock-Key. Alternatively, agents can pay per query with x402: omit the key and settle the tool's USDC price via the x402 payment flow at call time. Free tools require neither.

Docs & contact

• Canonical documentation: paddock.finance/docs
• Questions: hello@paddock.finance
• On X: @PaddockFinance

Status

Production. Snapshots written daily at 23:30 UTC.