--- title: "How this store works" description: "How scvd.store turns an observation of somebody else's payment endpoint into signed evidence a third party can check without trusting us — and what happens to your money if you buy our labour on top of it." canonical: "https://scvd.store/how-it-works" url: "https://scvd.store/how-it-works" --- # How this store works How scvd.store turns an observation of somebody else's payment endpoint into signed evidence a third party can check without trusting us — and what happens to your money if you buy our labour on top of it. ## What this is The mechanism of this store in one document: how a claim about somebody else's endpoint is made, signed, chained and published so a third party can check it without trusting us, and what happens to your money if you buy our labour on top of it. ## What you can use it for Deciding whether to rely on anything this store publishes, and on what terms. It is written for a caller who has never been here, needs to know what kind of thing an observation is before citing one, and wants the failure modes named before it spends. Nothing here narrows what you may do with the record: it is free, complete, and licensed for reuse, including by people building something that competes with us. ## What this is not Never a ranking, and never a verdict without its derivation and denominator beside it. Not a certification, and not an escrow, a guarantor, or a dispute court. Those last three absorb the risk between payment and delivery and need a balance sheet; this store observes that gap, signs what it saw, and publishes it. A verdict here is one dated observation of one moment, which expires and is re-taken, or a derivation from those that prints its rule and its fraction — never a standing judgement about an operator. ## How evidence is made ### The knock #### Step 1 #### What happens Once a week the round walks the public x402 discovery feeds and sends one plain GET to every door they name. No authentication is bypassed, no rate limit is evaded, and nothing private is read. #### What you can check The feeds are public and so is the door list: /doors.json names every host ever seen, and every host page carries the weeks we did NOT reach it, with the reason. ### The reading #### Step 2 #### What happens The bytes that came back are run through a named battery of checks. Each check has a published name, so two instruments can mean the same thing by the same word, and a check that cannot run says so instead of passing. #### What you can check The vocabulary is at /defects.json and the desk that runs the battery is free at /api/conformance/v1 — point it at your own door, or at ours. ### The signature #### Step 3 #### What happens The reading is written as one dated observation and signed ed25519. The signature covers the observation, not a summary of it, so an artifact cannot be edited into agreeing with a later story. #### What you can check Verification is free and permanent at /api/verify/{id}, and it works offline: the public key is published and the artifact carries everything the check needs. ### The chain #### Step 4 #### What happens Observations are sealed into weekly snapshots linked by hash, so a row cannot be changed after the fact without breaking every snapshot after it. #### What you can check Every snapshot is listed at /corpus.json with its digest. Fetch two consecutive weeks and verify the link yourself. ### The anchor #### Step 5 #### What happens Snapshot digests are submitted to OpenTimestamps for Bitcoin anchoring, which puts the existence of a reading at a time beyond this store's reach to revise. #### What you can check The anchor proofs are public and verifiable with any OpenTimestamps client. We cannot forge them and cannot withdraw them. ## How money works ### Order of operations The store prepares instant goods or the order before requesting settlement. A failure before settlement takes no money. A failure after settlement can leave delivery incomplete; keep the original payment and recovery handle, and do not pay again. ### What money buys Our labour on the record. Never the record itself: the corpus, the battery, the vocabulary and every published observation are free forever and are not behind any payment. A purchase buys a fresh look, a longer look, a look aimed somewhere specific, or a signed artifact you can hand to a third party. ### What money never buys A verdict. Nothing on the shelf changes what an observation says, and a paid look that finds a defect reports the defect. If money could move a reading, every reading would be worth nothing. ### Rails USDC over x402 v2 on Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, World, Solana, Arc (Circle Gateway), or USDC over MPP (evm/charge) on Base for every shelf item, every publication page and the commission desk. ### Recurrence Nothing here charges again by itself, ever — there is no mechanism that could. Some items cover a term of days for one payment; when the term ends it stops, and a further purchase is a decision you make. ### Refunds A failure after settlement may need recovery or a refund. Inspect the retained purchase before acting. The keeper pays refunds manually and records their status on the public refund ledger. ### Trade accounts The one door where money does not move through us: a marketplace with a trade account (/trade) collects its customer's payment itself and orders by signed webhook; we deliver the same goods, bill the account on a statement, and the certificate says so — settled_via: trade_account, no chain fields — because no chain was involved. ### Cheapest on the shelf USDC 0.001 ### The whole shelf ## Price ### This surface free ### Cadence not applicable — nothing is charged for reading this ### The whole record free, forever, and never behind a payment ### Free instruments | URL | Answers | Method | | --- | --- | --- | | https://scvd.store/api/preflight/v1 | Is this x402 door shaped the way the protocol says, and what did it actually serve? | POST | | https://scvd.store/api/conformance/v1 | Do these signed offers and receipts conform — including a competitor's, including ours? | POST | | https://scvd.store/api/before-you-pay/v1 | Would a stock x402 client be able to pay this door at all, before I try? | POST | | https://scvd.store/api/look/v1 | What does this store hold about this door — one live probe and the signed history of its host, in one call? | POST | | https://scvd.store/doors.json | Which doors have you ever looked at, and what did the last look see? | GET | | https://scvd.store/corpus.json | Every signed weekly snapshot, with digests, so I can rebuild any figure myself. | GET | | https://scvd.store/defects.json | What do you mean by each defect name, so my instrument and yours can agree? | GET | | https://scvd.store/samples/once-over.json | What does a paid artifact actually look like, before I buy one? | GET | | https://scvd.store/menu.json | What is for sale, at what price, on what cadence? | GET | | https://scvd.store/pricing | What are the pricing rules this store signed itself to? | GET | ### Paid examples #### Spot Check ##### ID spot_check ##### Answers what the books already hold about a host, read back signed ##### Price $0.001 fixed, one-off; nothing here charges again by itself, ever — there is no mechanism that could ##### Price USDC 0.001 ##### Cadence one_off ##### Buy URL ##### Buy URL template > #### The Once-Over - **ID** — service_audit - **Answers** — one fresh, signed look at one endpoint, servable to a third party - **Price** — $5 fixed, one-off; nothing here charges again by itself, ever — there is no mechanism that could - **Price USDC** — 5 - **Cadence** — one_off - **Buy URL** — - **Buy URL template** — > #### The Conformance Watch ##### ID conformance_watch ##### Answers the same battery daily for a term, with drift derived from the signed rows ##### Price $5 fixed, covering a 7-day term, one payment; nothing here charges again by itself, ever — there is no mechanism that could ##### Price USDC 5 ##### Cadence term ##### Term days 7 ##### Buy URL ##### Buy URL template > #### The Launch Check - **ID** — launch_check - **Answers** — one real purchase attempt of your own door, from our field wallet, signed stage by stage - **Price** — $5 fixed, one-off; nothing here charges again by itself, ever — there is no mechanism that could - **Price USDC** — 5 - **Cadence** — one_off - **Buy URL** — - **Buy URL template** — > #### The Opening Day ##### ID opening_day ##### Answers that walk, then a week of daily passes on the same door, then your passport page — one certificate, one URL ##### Price $9 fixed, covering a 7-day term, one payment; nothing here charges again by itself, ever — there is no mechanism that could ##### Price USDC 9 ##### Cadence term ##### Term days 7 ##### Buy URL ##### Buy URL template > #### The Company an Address Keeps ##### ID provenance_check ##### Answers which doors advertised a receiving address and when, read from the signed chain, delivered to you and never published ##### Price $5 fixed, one-off; nothing here charges again by itself, ever — there is no mechanism that could ##### Price USDC 5 ##### Cadence one_off ##### Buy URL ##### Buy URL template > #### The Case File ##### ID the_case_file ##### Answers everything this store observed about one purchase in one signed file, each section present or absent by name, never a verdict ##### Price $0.25 fixed, one-off; nothing here charges again by itself, ever — there is no mechanism that could ##### Price USDC 0.25 ##### Cadence one_off ##### Buy URL ##### Buy URL template > ## How to call - **The whole document** — GET https://scvd.store/how-it-works.json - **The same thing** — GET https://scvd.store/how-it-works with an Accept header that is not text/html - **Authentication** — None. No key, no header, no payment, and nothing to sign. - **Rate limit** — None published; be reasonable and cache. The document changes only when the shelf does. - **Smallest useful call** — curl -s https://scvd.store/how-it-works.json | jq '.how_money_works.order_of_operations' - **What to read next** — https://scvd.store/doors.json for the record itself, https://scvd.store/menu.json for the shelf ## Expected outcome A JSON object describing the mechanism: the five steps by which an observation becomes checkable evidence, how payment is ordered against delivery, the free doors with what each one answers, and the paid rungs with prices read off the live shelf. It takes no input, touches no wallet, and is the same for every caller. ## Errors | Code | Means | What to do | | --- | --- | --- | | method_not_allowed | This door answers GET only. A POST reaches nothing here. | Send GET. There is no body to post and no field to fill. | | not_found | The path was not /how-it-works or /how-it-works.json. | Check the spelling. Both spellings above return the same document; the bare path also serves HTML to a browser. | ## FAQ ### Item 1 #### Q Why should I believe any of this? #### A You should not have to. Every step names something you can check without us: the discovery feeds are public, verification is free and works offline, the snapshots carry digests you can relink, and the anchors are in Bitcoin. If a claim here has no walkable path, that is a defect and the corrections desk wants it. ### Item 2 #### Q What happens if I pay and the thing fails? #### A The store prepares instant goods or the order before requesting settlement. A failure before settlement takes no money. A failure after settlement can leave delivery incomplete; keep the original payment and recovery handle, and do not pay again. ### Item 3 #### Q Will buying something change what you say about my door? #### A No, and the store is built so it cannot. A paid look that finds a defect reports the defect. The record is free either way, and a purchase never removes, softens, or delays an observation. ### Item 4 #### Q Is anything here a subscription? #### A No. Some items cover a term of days for a single payment, and the term simply ends. This store holds no card and no mandate, so there is no mechanism by which a second charge could happen without you deciding to make it. ### Item 5 #### Q Can I use the record commercially, or to build a competitor? #### A Yes. It is published free and licensed for reuse. We would rather the market had good evidence in it than that we were the only ones holding any. ### Item 6 #### Q You observed my door and got it wrong. #### A Two free paths: the corrections desk, which publishes dated corrections rather than quietly editing, and a standing note, which puts your own dated statement beside our observation on every surface that shows it. ## Security ### What this surface reads Its own shelf, at request time. It takes no input, touches no wallet, makes no network call to any host, and reaches no caller-supplied URL. ### What it stores about you Nothing. There is no account, no cookie, no body to post, and no log entry keyed to a caller — true as of 2026-08-30, and held by a standing test that fails if this door ever sets a cookie or writes anything. ### What the data is A description of this store's own method. It contains no observation about anybody else's endpoint; every such observation lives behind the free doors named here, and those say plainly what they saw and when. ### Integrity Every price and cadence on this page is read off the live shelf rather than typed, so the page cannot quote a number the store stopped charging. The evidence claims it describes are checkable at the doors it names — you do not have to take this page's word for any of them. ### Standards Disclosure is private-first and symmetric — an operator hears from us before the public does, and we hold ourselves to the same rule when the defect is ours. Corrections are dated and public, never silent, including corrections to this page. ### Reporting /.well-known/security.txt, and the corrections desk takes anything we got wrong. ## Corrections Things this store said that later proved wrong live at /corrections — dated, with what changed so each cannot recur quietly. If a claim on this surface was ever corrected, that is where the correction stands. ## Honest limits This page describes the method, not its coverage. The round sees only the doors public discovery feeds declare, reads them once a week with one instrument, and this store's own host is in no round at all — a Worker cannot fetch itself — so we are structurally absent from our own denominators. That is stated because it flatters us.