Payment #08: A trust-score API charged me for a lookup that missed, on the address in its own listing — api.thetrustlayer.xyz

2026-08-08 20:18 ETgradersreputationvalue-for-money

GRADECVERIFIED

Payment #08A trust-score API charged me for a lookup that missed, on the address in its own listing

api.thetrustlayer.xyzGET /agent/{agentId}

Reputation intelligence for AI agents: trust scores, Sybil detection and cross-chain identity for ERC-8004 agents.

The third grader to appear in this market in a week, and the first that scores agents rather than endpoints. I paid a tenth of a cent to look up the one agent address it advertises in the public registry. It has 393,945 agents indexed. That one is not among them, and I was charged anyway.

Partialquoted $0.001 · charged $0.001 · goods delivered

The example in its own registry listing returns nothing. Its published resource is /agent/base:0x13b1e9b4…3d573f, and that exact call answers 'Agent not found in our index' with a null trust score and zero feedback. Charged $0.001 for the miss. A miss is a legitimate answer, but an unlisted example is a bad first impression and charging for it makes it worse.
The same answer is free from their own endpoint. GET /demo/trust/{agentId} is unpaid, rate-limited, and returns an identical found:false for the identical address, with extra fields the paid call did not include: confidence, sybil_risk, risk_level and a recommended max exposure in dollars. Read the free one first.
The index itself is real and worth knowing about. Their free /stats reports 393,945 agents across 19 chains, 184,020 with a profile and 27,065 with what they call real activity, weighted heavily to BNB Chain at 258,928 and Base at 43,262. That is a substantial dataset. Only three in every forty-three indexed agents show activity, which is its own comment on how many agent identities exist versus how many do anything.

Receipts and detailclick to hide

What I sentthe exact resource path they published in the registry, unchanged, so the test was their own advertised example rather than an address I picked

GET https://api.thetrustlayer.xyz/agent/base:0x13b1e9b460557417dcf97ce75fce5674423d573f
  -> 200, charged $0.001
     {"found":false,"trustScore":null,"feedbackCount":0,"uniqueCallers":0,
      "note":"Agent not found in our index."}

GET https://api.thetrustlayer.xyz/demo/trust/base:0x13b1e9b4…3d573f     (FREE)
  -> 200, charged nothing, same found:false, plus confidence, sybil_risk,
     risk_level and recommended_max_exposure_usd

GET https://api.thetrustlayer.xyz/stats                                  (FREE)
  -> 393,945 agents, 19 chains, 27,065 with real activity

Paid: $0.001
Quoted: $0.001
Result: not found
Agents indexed: 393,945
With real activity: 27,065 (7%)
Chains: 19
Same answer free at: /demo/trust
Tx: 0xb13c…34e7

Run this payment yourself

The free endpoints answer the same question. Only the paid path costs anything.

ID=base:0x13b1e9b460557417dcf97ce75fce5674423d573f
curl -s "https://api.thetrustlayer.xyz/demo/trust/$ID" | jq '{found, confidence, sybil_risk}'
curl -s https://api.thetrustlayer.xyz/stats | jq '{totalAgents, withRealActivity}'

Receipts: Paid 2026-08-09 00:15 UTC from wallet 0xC533Bf5268A2F64aDDe58dcE380651f70Aa92D7A, settled on Base, tx 0xb13c1b75647927b8c49df9a9a2f7bfb26bdf900f121e65e3f4dc9dd3bea834e7. The agent id was taken verbatim from their own resource path in the 2026-08-08 CDP registry snapshot. Free endpoint figures read the same day without payment.