Prove it on one route

Start observe-only, establish a real baseline, then test durable tickets on one overloaded GET or HEAD endpoint before adding funded staging settlement.

Good pilot targets

MCP servers

Machine-native clients and visible retry behavior.

AI/data APIs

Rate limits are visible, and agent retries can waste tokens or paid calls.

GPU/compute queues

Capacity is scarce and deadline-sensitive admission is easy to measure.

Launch-day endpoints

Bursty demand creates synchronized traffic and retry storms.

Baseline before installing

Requests per minute to the scarce endpoint.
429 rate.
Retry multiplier after each 429.
Successful completion rate after throttling.
Origin CPU/load during spikes.
Agent-visible latency and failure rate.

Pilot phases

Observe only: log existing 429s and retry behavior.
Free path only: keep client settlement policy disabled and exercise the signed free ticket even though the current Worker also includes an auction offer.
Client handler: add x429-aware retry to one agent/client path.
Mock priority: test the paid lane without money while proof, capacity, lease, and replay checks remain enforced.
Exact staging: use a limited Base Sepolia payer, real x402 challenge/signature/response headers, a fixed payee, and operator-owned reconciliation.
Production exact decision: require a funded canary record, the fixed-price single-client safety profile, upstream assertion verification, delivery/refund terms, incident runbook, independent audit plan, and legal approval.

Publish measured results

Publish measured origin results: request attempts per completed task, completion rate after throttling, and redemption timing relative to the offered window.

Do not reuse simulator output as pilot evidence. Capture a baseline and post-install result for the same route and demand pattern.

The console has no hosted synthetic/demo feed. Connect only an operator-provisioned project credential and label any locally generated load as test traffic.

Kill criteria

If real agent traffic rarely hits 429, the market may be early.
If no clients can adopt the retry handler, the protocol path is blocked.
If ticket breach rate is nonzero under controlled load, stop and fix admission math.
If priority adds no user value, keep the pilot ticket-only.
If an indeterminate payment cannot be resolved safely through both RPC providers, disable exact mode.
If direct upstream bypass or origin-assertion replay succeeds, stop the rollout.