Methodology

Neutrality and verification

The Agent Economy is a public directory of infrastructure, and the newsletter of the same name. It lists mechanisms. It does not rank them.

Run by Max Curnin, Executive Chairman of Accords. Accords is listed under the same criteria as every other entry and is never ranked or styled differently.

Order

Inside a category, listings are alphabetical by name. Filters narrow that list. They do not promote a listing. A sponsor slot is labeled paid placement and sits outside the list.

What a listing may claim

Each factual sentence should be traceable to a public source linked on the listing. The directory does not publish star counts, user counts, volume, or funding numbers. If a public page does not support a concrete mechanism, the project stays out.

Status

Status is a directory label, not a score. Live means a public specification or service offered for use. Beta means the authors still describe part of the work as preliminary. Designed means a published draft, or a design that this directory is not treating as a finished service. The last verified date is the day those sources were checked.

How a listing is added

A maintainer adds a JSON object under data/listings and opens a pull request. The submit form does not publish. It writes a review queue entry for a person to check against the sources. See the README for the fields and the environment variables.

Comparisons, filters, and glossary

A comparison page places two listings from the same category side by side and restates each mechanism. A filter page narrows the directory by category, status, open source, or tag, then lists the matches alphabetically. A glossary entry defines one mechanism, cites a public source, and links to the listings that use it. None of these pages scores an entry.

Adoption figures

Payment rail listings can show an adoption block with two sides. The vendor claim quotes a figure the vendor published. The independent measurement quotes a figure published by someone other than that vendor. Each figure keeps the source link, the day the source was checked, and the date the source itself gives when it gives one.

The block does not compute a ratio, a gap, or a percentage. If no public figure was found, that side says UNKNOWN. A note can quote a separate finding only with its own source. Send a correction, or a better public source, through the submit form.

Listings dataset

The same listings are published as JSON at /data/listings.json. The license is CC BY 4.0. Attribution: The Agent Economy listings, with a link to that file.

A plain text index for answer engines is at llms.txt, and the full text of the listings, comparisons, filters, and glossary is at llms-full.txt.

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