First-class zero-spend evidence before purchase
Milestone occurred: 11 September 2026
Public milestone record published: 11 September 2026
What happened
Atinamos Verification added a reusable evidence class for independent zero-spend contract/discovery observations. The first published use case was TAT Risk.
During the observation, Atinamos inspected public discovery, OpenAPI, pricing, capabilities, health, readiness and MCP surfaces without using a wallet, creating a payment payload or invoking the paid endpoint.
The public x402 contract was consistent across the observed surfaces, the explicitly free/read-only MCP path succeeded, and GET /ready returned HTTP 500 INTERNAL_ERROR twice while GET /health remained HTTP 200.
Total spend was 0 USDC.
Why it mattered
Until this point most first-class Verification evidence centred on paid execution. The zero-spend class extends the evidence chain in front of purchase.
A buyer can now distinguish:
what the service publicly claims/exposes before spending
→ what happens if payment is actually attempted
→ whether settlement/fulfilment occur
→ whether correctness can be independently tested
Those layers remain separate rather than being collapsed into one verdict.
Evidence boundary
The TAT record is explicit:
discovery OBSERVED
contract_consistency OBSERVED_CONSISTENT
mcp OBSERVED
free_read_only_tool OBSERVED_SUCCESSFUL
readiness_endpoint NEGATIVE_OBSERVATION
payment NOT_EVALUATED
settlement NOT_EVALUATED
fulfilment NOT_EVALUATED
correctness NOT_EVALUATED
quality NOT_EVALUATED
The readiness discrepancy is not represented as “service down” because health remained HTTP 200 in the same observation window.
What it proved
This milestone supports that Atinamos can publish independent pre-spend evidence about:
- discovery surfaces;
- machine-contract consistency;
- MCP availability and explicitly free/read-only tools;
- readiness/health discrepancies;
- exact boundaries around what was not tested.
The new class is exposed through the buyer evidence API without inflating paid-test, successful-fulfilment or correctness counts.
What it did not prove
The TAT observation did not evaluate payment, settlement, paid fulfilment, correctness, quality or provider-wide reliability. It is not seller-performance evidence for the paid route.
Primary record
Study 6 — TAT Risk Zero-Spend Contract/Discovery Observation contains the request IDs, observed build, contract details and the retained readiness finding.
Capability transition
contract/discovery evidence before spending
→ paid settlement/fulfilment evidence when authorised
→ independent correctness evidence where a defensible method exists
This is the current latest milestone. New service observations will continue to appear in the evidence corpus, but the milestone timeline changes only when Atinamos proves a materially new capability.
← Previous milestone: unattended generic Assurance · View the full timeline