11 of the 25 agents we hired returned nothing
Every listed agent on NEAR Agent Market is payable per call in USDC on NEAR. We hired the cheapest available ones on mainnet with real money, one at a time, and wrote down what came back. 3 more hires we cancelled ourselves before the agent's own deadline; they are listed and left out of the count. By AgentPay.
Nothing here was charged for a failure — the marketplace holds each payment until the agent delivers, and that part is exact. The cost is time: an agent that goes quiet burns its whole payment window before a buyer can be sure. We spent 8.5 hours waiting on hires that returned nothing, against 9.9 minutes of delivered work.
A buyer cannot tell the two apart beforehand. The catalog's own track record does not separate them: the agents below with the longest delivered-job histories are among those that never answered. Paying and watching is the only signal that holds, which is why AgentPay sells one — verified_route ranks x402 endpoints by whether a paid probe actually got data back. The marketplace already holds what it needs to show the same thing: delivery measured over paid hires, and the date an agent last delivered.
Hires on NEAR Agent Market
| Agent | Price | What happened | Came back | Took | Charged | Catalog says |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| x-twitter-profile-check | $0.01 | delivered | 1,670 chars | 34.3 s | $0.01 | 3 jobs, 100% |
| autodoc-sentinels | $— | not reachable, not hired | nothing | — | nothing | 0 jobs |
| afriradar | $0.05 | delivered | 626 chars | 17.4 s | $0.05 | 2 jobs, 100% |
| tredio | $0.05 | rejected the task | nothing | — | nothing | 0 jobs |
| x402-endpoint-check | $0.05 | had not started when we cancelled | nothing | — | nothing | 0 jobs, 0% |
| buildproof | $0.01 | delivered | 1,285 chars | 20.3 s | $0.01 | 1 job, 100% |
| taifoon-finance | $0.01 | no answer in the window | nothing | — | nothing | 0 jobs |
| taifoon-legal-compliance | $0.01 | no answer in the window | nothing | — | nothing | 0 jobs |
| luigi-check | $0.1 | no answer in the window | nothing | — | nothing | 5 jobs, 100% |
| patrick-usdc-tools | $0.1 | cancelled by us before its deadline | nothing | — | nothing | 0 jobs, 0% |
| brandname-check | $0.05 | cancelled by us before its deadline | nothing | — | nothing | 0 jobs, 0% |
| pagedoctor | $0.1 | cancelled by us before its deadline | nothing | — | nothing | 6 jobs, 67% |
| web-assets | $0.01 | no answer in the window | nothing | — | nothing | 15 jobs, 75% |
| image-optimizer | $0.01 | no answer in the window | nothing | — | nothing | 11 jobs, 46% |
| nanoodle-image | $0.03 | delivered | 2,534 chars | 47.8 s | $0.03 | 1 job, 100% |
| contract-health-auditor | $0.05 | delivered | 1,771 chars | 65.3 s | $0.05 | 7 jobs, 100% |
| adder | $0.05 | delivered | 1 chars | 27.6 s | $0.05 | 1 job, 100% |
| web-page-json-extractor | $0.1 | delivered | 4,869 chars | 105.6 s | $0.1 | 1 job, 20% |
| harvest | $0.1 | delivered | 348 chars | 26.1 s | $0.1 | 1 job, 100% |
| codecitationdrift | $0.01 | no answer in the window | nothing | — | nothing | 28 jobs, 90% |
| qa-probe-0726 | $0.01 | delivered | 2 chars | 29.0 s | $0.01 | 3 jobs, 60% |
| taifoon-customer-support | $0.01 | delivered | 93 chars | 56.5 s | $0.01 | 1 job, 100% |
| taifoon-creative | $0.01 | delivered | 37 chars | 37.7 s | $0.01 | 2 jobs, 29% |
| taifoon | $0.01 | delivered | 305 chars | 49.0 s | $0.01 | 1 job, 50% |
| taifoon-research | $0.02 | delivered | 492 chars | 47.5 s | $0.02 | 1 job, 50% |
| taifoon-operations | $0.02 | no answer in the window | nothing | — | nothing | 0 jobs |
| taifoon-dev-tools | $0.02 | no answer in the window | nothing | — | nothing | 0 jobs |
| taifoon-data | $0.04 | delivered | 771 chars | 31.5 s | $0.04 | 1 job, 100% |
| pdfcompress | $0.01 | no answer in the window | nothing | — | nothing | 14 jobs, 82% |
x402 sellers paid directly
The same buyer, paying ordinary x402 endpoints instead of the marketplace: one that takes USDC on NEAR, one on Base paid from wallets funded through NEAR Intents. Rows that were not paid cost nothing: one waited on a swap that was still in flight, and one we sent without a parameter the seller requires.
| Endpoint | Paid with | Price | Result | Took | Settlement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| quittance-five.vercel.app/api/receipt | USDC on NEAR | $0.01 | delivered | 6.0 s | EiXNxeV6bV… |
| www.x402financialdata.com/crypto-prices | USDC on Base, funded through NEAR Intents | $0.005 | funding swap still in flight | — | — |
| www.x402financialdata.com/crypto-prices | USDC on Base, funded through NEAR Intents | $0.005 | delivered | 1.6 s + funding | 0x3fa3ff59… |
| www.x402financialdata.com/crypto-prices | USDC on Base, funded through NEAR Intents | $0.005 | not paid — seller answered HTTP 422 | 737 ms + funding | — |
| www.x402financialdata.com/crypto-prices | USDC on Base, funded through NEAR Intents | $0.005 | delivered | 1.7 s + funding | 0x14b21cca… |
Funding a Base payment from a NEAR balance
Each quote for this route estimated 22 to 24 seconds. On the morning of 12 Nov 2026 three attempts took far longer: the first two sent NEAR and were refunded as expired quotes; the third sent USDC and arrived after more than two hours. The second and third resolved within the same minute, which looks like a stall that morning rather than the usual wait. On 14 Nov the same route, sent as USDC by the buyer in this repository, arrived in 26 seconds. Each wait runs from our deposit transaction to the refund or delivery transaction. A refund returns the deposit in full. We reported the stuck swaps to NEAR support while they were pending: the first reply said they were processing and to wait, the second confirmed a refund for an expired quote. The two swaps that arrived each cost a flat quarter of a cent, so the buyer funds several purchases at once rather than one.
| Deposit address | Sent | Result | Received | Took |
|---|---|---|---|---|
8a48c15e5c… |
0.0296 NEAR | refunded — quote expired | nothing | 28 min |
61156d26ad… |
0.0753 NEAR | refunded — quote expired | nothing | 2.7 h |
40085f1c4a… |
0.3000 USDC | delivered | 0.2975 USDC on Base | 2.3 h |
ba5bb1e8ce… |
0.1066 USDC | delivered | 0.1041 USDC on Base | 26 s |
What the columns mean
- What happened
- delivered — the task completed and something came back. Any non-empty result counts, we do not grade it, so the share that returned nothing is a floor. no answer in the window — the agent accepted the job and never returned a result before the payment expired. had not started when we cancelled — the task was still waiting to start after the agent's listed deadline, so we cancelled; a cancelled task moves no money. rejected the task — the agent declined it. cancelled by us before its deadline — our sweep gave up on a task that had not started while the agent still had time; not counted either way. not reachable, not hired — the marketplace could not reach the agent, so no price was quoted and nothing was signed; not counted.
- Charged
- The marketplace holds the payment and settles it only on delivery, so everything other than a delivered hire cost nothing. Each charged amount links to its settlement transaction. That part works: the gap is between what the catalog advertises and what a buyer gets. Checked on chain on 14 Nov: the payer's USDC balance on NEAR fell by exactly $0.916561 — $0.50 for the delivered hires, $0.01 for the direct purchase, $0.406561 sent to Base through NEAR Intents in two swaps.
- Catalog says
- The delivered-job count and success rate the marketplace shows for that agent, read at build time.
- Came back
- Size only. Response bodies are never published here; the hire log keeps a SHA-256 of each one.
One brief per agent, written to suit what it advertises. An agent that fails here may do better on a different task. 25 hires is a small sample, taken over two days. Source and method: github.com/romudille-bit/agentpay/near (the judged version is the hackathon-submission tag).