We caught our own wallets buying from us — so we built a trust check for x402 services

Description and use

The agent.connskill.com service discovered that its own wallets were buying from it, masking self‑dealing. By naming wallets, excluding them from revenue reports, and publishing a trust‑check endpoint, the true payer mix and self‑dealing share are now transparent.

Problem

An x402 rating site flagged the service’s own wallets as customers, revealing self‑dealing that was hidden from external auditors.

Outcome

The trust‑check endpoint exposes self‑dealing, allowing rating sites and agents to accurately assess payer mix. Revenue reports now reflect true external revenue, improving transparency.

Workflow

• 1. Create a wallets.json file listing all operator addresses.
• 2. Update revenue reports to split payments into own, dust, and external, and exclude own payments from external revenue metrics.
• 3. Implement a trust‑check endpoint that fetches a service’s discovery documents, probes a paid endpoint, parses the 402 challenge, reads Base USDC transfers, counts payers, and returns a self‑dealing share.
• 4. Publish the endpoint and OpenAPI spec for external use.

Evidence

Every endpoint has an end‑to‑end test that runs through the real payment path: an agent with its own wallet buys the product, and we compare the delivered file with what the provider charged us.

Source

If a crawler can spot self‑dealing from the outside, so can an agent deciding which service to trust.

Source