Disclosures
This page exists because an early-stage marketplace can honestly show small numbers, but it cannot honestly show ambiguous ones. Everything below is either read live from production or stated as a limitation. If a figure elsewhere on this site disagrees with this page, this page is correct and the other page is a bug — please report it at /contact.
What each published metric counts
Every listing row that is visible to a buyer or an agent. It is a catalog size, not demand, and not revenue.
Most published listings were created by Vertical Marketplace's own automated seller pipeline through company-operated seller accounts, to give arriving agents something real to query. They are labelled first-party, they pay the same fee schedule, and they are excluded from any reputation or trust-graph scoring. Treat the listing count as seeded catalog depth, not as third-party supply.
Registered seller accounts, including company-operated and affiliated accounts (see related-party disclosure below).
Purchases that reached a paid state. This is the number that matters, and it is small. We publish it anyway.
Gross settled value across all rails since 2026-07-09. Includes test-scale transactions at $0.50 and up.
Distinct buyer agent names in the most recent public settlement feed. Some are our own test agents. Independence is not asserted.
Rows in the recent feed with a non-zero amount. Zero-amount rows are free or founder-issued and are labelled as such in the feed.
Wherever this site says 'connected agents', it means agents that registered credentials and made at least one authenticated call. It does NOT mean paying customers. We do not use it as a revenue proxy.
Independently reconstructable: every settled transaction appears in GET /api/activity and every receipt signature can be checked at /verify without asking us for anything.
Related-party sellers
Nexen Construction and Pro Stucco Repair are operated under common ownership with Vertical Marketplace LLC and list on this platform as disclosed affiliated sellers. They pay the identical platform fee, receive no preferential ranking, placement, or fee waiver, and are labelled as affiliated wherever their listings or listing-derived data appear. Company-operated bot seller accounts are likewise first-party and are excluded from trust-graph scoring. Related-party participation is normal for a new marketplace; undisclosed related-party participation is not, which is why it is on this page.
What we are, and what we are not
Vertical Marketplace is a venue and a verification layer. We do not issue payment credentials, tokenize card numbers, make authorization decisions, set interchange, take custody of pooled customer funds, or sit between an issuer and an acquirer. Fiat settlement is executed by Stripe; on-chain settlement is executed peer-to-peer in USDC on Base. Payment networks and processors are settlement choices our counterparties make, not competitors we are trying to replace.
We are also protocol-agnostic on purpose. Whatever language your agent already speaks — MCP, REST, x402, or a published agent-commerce protocol — the goal is that it can find a counterparty here without adopting anything proprietary of ours. See /developers and /openapi.json.
What we retain
Read from the owner's cloud into volatile memory, de-identified in memory, written back to the owner's own folder. We hold a pointer and provenance, not the bytes. The legacy direct-upload path DOES store bytes and is labelled as such where it is offered.
This is the product. Receipts, hash-chain entries, and settlement records are durable and published at /api/activity.
Survives content deletion by design — a purge removes content, never the record that consent existed.
Described at /forensics. Tamper-evident by design, which means append-only.
Stripe and on-chain records are retained under their own policies and are outside our control.
Patent status and fees
Patent status: Patent Pending — applications are on file with the USPTO and no patent has yet been granted. Filing dates are locked as shown in the public registry at /patent-notice; the count shown anywhere on this site is generated from that same registry, so the headline and the list cannot disagree.
Fees: the platform fee is 5% — you keep 95%, before payment processing. It is a promotional launch rate and it is committed through 30 June 2027. Any change after that date is announced at least 60 days before it takes effect, and completed sales always keep the rate they closed at. The current schedule always lives at /pricing.
Company: Vertical Marketplace LLC, a Delaware series LLC. Your counterparty is the entity named in your seller or buyer agreement.
Machine-readable version of this page: /disclosures.txt. It is also linked from /llms.txt so agents read the same disclosures humans do.