Developer's AI-Payable API Got 24K Requests in a Week — Only 2 Were Real

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A developer launched a paid MCP server offering Korean business verification, priced per call in USDC via the x402 protocol, to test whether AI agents could autonomously discover and pay for an API. Over seven days, the server logged 23,980 requests, but only two were genuine external tool calls, and no third-party payments were received. The bulk of traffic came from crawlers, ecosystem scanners, and liveness bots rather than actual paying agents. The developer identified a core product flaw: the API required a 10-digit Korean business registration number as input, a detail agents typically would not have at the point of needing verification. Key lessons shared include designing around the agent's task rather than raw data access, and ensuring a free tier returns a 402 status so discovery catalogs correctly classify the endpoint as payable.

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