Proof of Demand
Seeded briefs are not demand. Briefs seeded by the platform show what the format looks like rather than proving that buyers want it. Only paid, buyer-initiated activity counts as demand, and the two are labelled separately on this page. Below is every settled transaction on the platform — not a selection, not a highlight reel — with the amount, the rail, the fee we took, and whether either side was an account we operate. It is read live from production at page load.
Generated 2026-09-14 15:56:26 UTC · window 2026-07-14 → 2026-09-13 · source GET /api/proof/demand
Participation: independent sellers
Who has put something on the shelf. This is a supply measure and says nothing about buying; the settled-sales ledger is the section below. Source GET /api/proof/participation, a daily database snapshot.
As of September 14, 2026: 6 independent sellers have 58 live listings. All 6 self-onboarded, with first listings dated August 22–September 13. No independent paid sale has been recorded.
Each seller is counted once, on the date of their first published listing. Sellers remain counted if their listings later become inactive. This measures listing participation, not buyer demand or sales. Platform-operated and affiliated sellers are excluded. Updated 2026-09-14 07:02 UTC.
Sellers counted from the date of their first listing. Live today: 6 sellers, 58 listings (the largest single seller holds 40, 69%). Snapshot 2026-09-14 07:02 UTC. No smoothing, no projection.
| Seller | First listed | Live listings | Latest listing |
|---|---|---|---|
| S-000519 | Sep 13, 2026 | 1 | Xtawiz content studio - video localization, captions, cuts |
| S-000490 | Sep 10, 2026 | 2 | DESK LEAD x402 micropay APIs |
| S-000489 | Sep 9, 2026 | 1 | x402 soft-stop earn-ops brief (Base USDC rails) |
- S-000519First listed Sep 13, 2026Xtawiz content studio - video localization, captions, cuts1 live listing
- S-000490First listed Sep 10, 2026DESK LEAD x402 micropay APIs2 live listings
- S-000489First listed Sep 9, 2026x402 soft-stop earn-ops brief (Base USDC rails)1 live listing
Independent means the seller account is not operated by Vertical Marketplace LLC, is not one of the platform's own publishing or ingest accounts, and is not under common ownership with the company. The excluded accounts are listed in code and configuration; the list can only remove a seller from the independent count, never add one.
Self-onboarded means the seller registered and published without direct outreach from the company. It does not establish how the seller found the marketplace.
Seller participation is a supply measure. It is not evidence of buyer demand or of sales. The settled-sales ledger is published separately at /api/proof/demand.
- The series counts sellers by the date of their first published listing, from a permanent insert-only record; a seller who later removes all listings still appears in the cumulative line but not in the live count.
- History is recorded from September 11, 2026. Sellers whose listings were all inactive before that date are not in the series.
- Listing counts are concentrated: the top independent seller's share is disclosed above.
- Sellers are shown by anonymous public code (S-000000). Independence is a classification, not a verification of the seller's legal identity.
- Computed from the listings database at most once per day; the timestamp above is the actual computation time. If a refresh fails, the last verified snapshot is served with its original timestamp. No smoothing, no extrapolation.
- First-listing events are stored permanently (table seller_first_listings, insert-only) from September 11, 2026, seeded from listings active on that date. A seller who later removes all listings stays in the cumulative series. Affiliation corrections are recorded, never deleted.
79 ledger rows: 77 settled sales — the canonical totalSales figure reported by GET /api/stats and GET /api/marketplace/stats — plus 2 reference-listing rows, disclosed here but never counted as sales. 13 rows are zero-amount (free / founder-issued) and counted separately from revenue.
Where the money actually is — held is not released
Held is not released. Money in the held bucket is sitting in platform escrow and has not reached the seller; it releases on the escrow clock after a first successful delivery (physical orders additionally wait on shipment). Released cents are what actually reached sellers.
How much of this is us buying from ourselves
Independent (arms-length) money settled to date: $0.00. That is the total from paid rows where neither the buyer nor the seller is an account we operate. Every other dollar below is us on at least one side of the trade.
Firsts — oldest matching row in the settlement ledger, recomputed at page load
Each row is the oldest matching entry in the full settlement ledger below. Early entries may be test-scale transactions as small as $0.50.
The ledger — every paid row
Every row above carries an Ed25519 settlement receipt you can check yourself at /verify or with POST /api/verify-receipt — you do not have to ask us, and you do not have to trust this table. The same rows appear in GET /api/activity.
What this does not prove
- Self-reported and unaudited. These are our own production records, not an auditor's.
- Zero-amount rows are free or founder-issued listings and are counted separately, never as revenue.
- A signed Ed25519 receipt exists for every row and can be checked with POST /api/verify-receipt.
- Small numbers are published as-is. No projection, no annualization, no run-rate.
- affiliatedRail rows are VM Pay settlements by affiliated (common-ownership) merchants. They are not marketplace purchases, are not in the totals above, and never count toward P0 or arms-length volume.
- It does not prove product-market fit. It proves the rails clear real money between real counterparties, that the receipts verify, and that we will show you the raw rows at this size before anyone makes us.
Metric definitions, related-party disclosure, and retention policy: /disclosures.