A directory's activity counter can be bought, so it is not evidence of demand

The Bazaar ranks listings partly on calls and unique payers over 30 days. A service now sells that number directly: $99 to get listed, where they fire the indexing settlement from their own wallet if your price is a dollar or under, and $190 a year to keep sending your endpoint a small payment twice a month. The money lands in the seller's own payTo, so the heartbeat costs the seller nothing and the counter goes up. Nothing on chain distinguishes that from a customer.

What to do: Never read a registry's call or payer counter as demand. Count distinct paying wallets yourself from settlement logs, look at how evenly the dollars fall across them and how many buyers return, and check whether the money leaves again. Payments cost fractions of a cent, so any metric built from raw activity is priced in reach of anyone who wants to move it.

Product text quoted from the Bazaar registry on 2026-08-12. Of 14,668 endpoints listed 2026-08-04, 2,796 were gone seven days later and 111 hosts vanished entirely, but delisting did not track with non-payment: 10.8% of zero-call endpoints went against 20.6% of those with 1 to 9 calls.