A few weeks ago I posted about testing 70 x402 services and finding that the average quality score was 34 out of 100. That post got some traction, and a few people asked: what about the other protocols?
Good question. So we expanded.
Cinderwright now indexes services across all three major agent payment protocols:
- x402 (Coinbase/Cloudflare) — 1,457 services. USDC on Base. Permissionless.
- MPP (Stripe/Tempo) — 91 services. Stablecoins + cards + Lightning. Session-based payments.
- L402 (Lightning Labs) — 5 seeded services. Bitcoin Lightning. Macaroon credentials.
Total: 1,551 services. One search, every protocol.
Why This Matters
Three competing payment protocols launched within months of each other. Developers are trying to figure out which one to build on. Agents need to find services regardless of which protocol they use.
The problem: every existing directory is protocol-specific. Coinbase's Agentic.market covers x402. Tempo's mpp.dev covers MPP. Satring.com covers L402. Nobody covers all three.
We do now.
curl https://api.ideafactorylab.org/protocols
Returns a live breakdown: how many services on each protocol, what each protocol is best for, and how to filter search results by protocol.
What's New: Market Intelligence
We also launched something I've been building toward for a while: paid market intelligence.
The index now contains enough data to answer questions like:
- Which service categories are overpriced compared to the ecosystem average?
- Which categories have fewer than 3 providers (low competition = opportunity)?
- What does pricing look like in the "financial" category vs "llm" vs "utility"?
Running the analysis right now across all 1,551 services:
- Ecosystem average price: $0.18 per call
- Most overpriced categories (relative to average): governance/audit services charge 4x the average
- Underserved categories (1-2 providers): identity verification, compliance
Three endpoints, all paid via x402:
GET /market/report # Full report — $1.00
GET /market/opportunity # Gap analysis — $0.50
GET /market/category?category=financial # Deep dive — $0.25
If you're building an x402 or MPP service and want to know where to compete, this is the data.
The Honest State of the Ecosystem
Two months in, here's what the data actually shows:
x402 has 1,457 services but most are abandoned hackathon projects. Average quality: 34/100. 52 out of 70 tested services are missing basic discovery files.
MPP has 91 services but they include Anthropic, OpenAI, Alchemy, and Dune Analytics. Higher quality, more institutional, backed by Stripe's compliance infrastructure.
L402 has been around the longest but the ecosystem is fragmented. The best directory (satring.com) has 562 services but gates access behind a 100 sat Lightning paywall — which is poetic but inconvenient.
The market is still early. Most "agents" making payments today are test bots and trading scripts. The general-purpose AI agents that would actually need service discovery at scale are still being built. But the infrastructure is getting real.
Free to Try
# Ecosystem overview
curl https://api.ideafactorylab.org/stats
# Protocol breakdown
curl https://api.ideafactorylab.org/protocols
# Quality grades
curl https://api.ideafactorylab.org/quality
If you're building a service on any of these protocols, submit it for free:
curl -X POST https://api.ideafactorylab.org/submit \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url":"https://your-api.com"}'
GitHub: https://github.com/cinderwright-ai/cinderwright-api
Built by an autonomous AI agent on OpenClaw. The agent indexes services, tests quality, tracks pricing, and now builds market intelligence. I describe what to build. It builds it.
