Check before you pay.

Your agent found an API. The API asked for money: a wallet, a chain, a token, a price. Nobody checked whether that wallet belongs to the seller, whether the price is normal, or whether anyone has ever paid it and got something back.

GET paddock.finance/api/mcp/verify-before-pay?endpoint_url=api.example.com&expect_price_usdc=0.02

Verdict

don't pay

Wallet

matches the seller on record

Chain

Base

Token

USDC

Price

asked 99.00, market is 0.02

Live

yes, settled 4 hours ago

Circular

no pattern found

checked 2026-09-04 14:22 UTC · 0.25 USDC

Get a free key Copy llms.txt

10 checks a day, no card. Or pay per call and skip the account entirely.

Why this exists

There is no Plaid for crypto because a pasted address gives you nothing to check it against. An x402 seller declares its wallet, chain, token and price inside the payment request. That gives us something to check, and a daily settlement record to check it against.

Online advertising had this exact problem. Money moved automatically, the seller reported on itself, and nobody could check — until independent verification became a required line on every media plan.

Agent payments are at that point now. The only account of whether a payment went well comes from the seller. We're the check. We take no cut of the payment and we don't sell placement, so nobody can buy a better answer.

This is for agent payments on x402, where the seller declares its terms. It is not a check for a human pasting an address into a wallet.

The same settlement record behind these answers runs our public market page, updated daily.

Three answers, and only three

We'd rather say we don't know

payChecks out against everything we can see.
don't paySomething is wrong, and we name it.
can't tellWe couldn't read enough to answer. Not a failing grade.

What agents are asking

Four ways this gets used

Choosing between providers

An agent has three endpoints that do the same job.

paddock.finance/api/mcp/verify-before-pay?endpoint_url=…&expect_price_usdc=0.05

pay · settled 12 minutes ago · price in range

Spend guardrail

A wallet or platform checks every payment its agents send.

paddock.finance/api/mcp/verify-before-pay?endpoint_url=…&pay_to=0xYOUR_WALLET

don't pay · the wallet asking for money isn't the one you agreed to pay

Something brand new

The endpoint has never been paid, by anyone.

paddock.finance/api/mcp/verify-before-pay?endpoint_url=…

can't tell · nothing settled here in 30 days

New, or dormant, and we can't tell which. We'd rather say so than guess.

Pricing risk

An underwriter working out what cover for agent payments should cost.

paddock.finance/api/mcp/verify-before-pay?endpoint_url=…

how often it settles · gaps between payments · 30 days

Anyone pricing this today is pricing blind, because there's no loss history for agent commerce yet. This is the closest thing that exists: what actually settled, from whom, dated.

Proof you can hand to someone else

Every check can return a signed record. It states what was asked, what had actually settled, the window we observed, and the verdict, signed with a key we publish. Anyone can fetch the record and verify the signature themselves. They do not have to trust us and they do not have to call us.

That matters when the check has to answer to someone later: a counterparty questioning a payment, an auditor, an underwriter. The verdict is our answer. The record is independent evidence of it.

In production

In autonomous machine commerce, attestation of the payment route must precede authorization of the payment payload. Paddock's verify_before_pay is the missing deterministic safety rail for the multi-rail agent economy.Walter Hawkins, Corrente Labs

How it works

Four steps, about a second

Your agent calls us before it authorizes payment
Plain HTTP. A free key, or pay per call and skip the account.
We ask the endpoint for its price, without paying
We trigger its payment request and read what it actually asks for — network, asset, wallet, amount. Live, at the moment you asked, not from a cached list.
We check that against what really settled
Against every settlement we've recorded: has it been paid, how recently, and by anyone other than its own owner. This is the part a seller can't report about itself.
You get one answer and the reason for it
Pay, don't pay, or can't tell — with the reason and the timestamp. Never a score you have to interpret, and never a ranking.