PRE-PAYMENT TRUST LAYER FOR X402

The Last Check Before Your Agent Pays.

check_merchant gives autonomous agents a trust recommendation — PROCEED, CAUTION, or INSUFFICIENT SIGNAL — built from a merchant's observable on-chain and x402 settlement history, before it commits to a real payment.

Start Integrating

How check_merchant Fits Into Agentic Commerce

Agents are autonomous but still need a trust check at the moment of payment. Here's where Gradient Decisions sits in that loop.

STEP 01
💬

Merchant Encountered

Agent hits an x402 402 Payment Required challenge from a merchant it hasn't dealt with before.

STEP 02
🔍

check_merchant Call

Agent calls check_merchant with the merchant's wallet address — $0.01, paid via x402 on Base.

STEP 03
▦

Signal Scoring

Wallet age, unique payers, settlement volume, and price fairness vs. category peers, scored from real activity.

STEP 04
✓

Trust Recommendation

Agent gets back PROCEED, CAUTION, or INSUFFICIENT SIGNAL, with the reasons behind it. Decision support, not a certification.

STEP 05
🛒

Agent Decides

Agent uses the recommendation to decide whether to complete the real payment to the merchant.

Built Specifically For Autonomous Commerce

📊

Real Observable Signals

Wallet age, unique payer count, settlement volume, and price fairness against category peers — computed from real on-chain and x402 activity, not self-reported claims.

📋

Pre-Payment Trust Scoring

PROCEED / CAUTION / INSUFFICIENT SIGNAL, with the reasons behind each call — decision support for an agent's payment logic, not a certification.

🔌

MCP-Native, With a Plain-HTTP Fallback

Works out of the box as an MCP tool over streamable HTTP, or as a plain GET /check endpoint for HTTP-only x402 clients.

Integrate in Minutes

Gradient Decisions works natively via MCP over streamable HTTP. Add it as a remote server and your agent can call check_merchant directly — no API keys, no accounts, every call authenticated by its own x402 payment.

  • No accounts or API keys — payment is the auth
  • $0.01 USDC per check, via x402 on Base mainnet
  • Same tool available as plain HTTP at GET /check
mcp-config.json 
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gradient-decisions": {
      "url": "https://mcp.gradientdecisions.com/mcp",
      "transport": "streamable-http"
    }
  }
}
2,029
Merchants indexed
23.8%
Proceed (483)
26.3%
Caution (534)
49.9%
Insufficient signal (1012)
1,844 merchants on Base · 25.3% proceed 185 merchants on Solana · 9.2% proceed

Last refreshed 8m ago. Aggregate counts only — per-merchant results are available via the paid check_merchant tool.

Real Merchants In Our Index

Exa

Proceed
api.exa.ai Search API · base

Search and content retrieval for agents.

5,372 calls (30d) 88 unique payers high confidence $0.0010–$0.0070 fair
Why
  • Consistent signals across wallet age, payer diversity, and settlement history

Vaaya

Proceed
vaaya.ai Agent Tool Gateway · base

Multi-tool x402 gateway — search, scraping, sandboxes, media generation.

45 calls (30d) 15 unique payers medium confidence
Why
  • Consistent signals across wallet age, payer diversity, and settlement history

Live check_merchant output for two merchants already in the index — every other merchant's recommendation and signals stay behind the paid tool.

Give Your Agent A Reason To Trust The Payment

Add Gradient Decisions to your agent's MCP config in under five minutes. Every check is $0.01, paid the same way as the payment it's protecting.

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