We went from 10 to 1,169 L402 Lightning services indexed overnight. Here’s what happened.

A few weeks ago I posted about trying to crawl satring.com — 562 L402 services behind a 100 sat paywall. Their payment facilitator (xpay.sh) had a bug. We paid $2.60 USDC across three transactions. Money left our wallet, data never arrived. Still unresolved.

This week we found 402index.io. They index L402 services. API is free and open. One crawl: 1,169 services added in about 30 seconds.

The discovery hub now:

• x402 (USDC on Base via Coinbase): 1,457 services
• MPP (Stripe/Tempo): 92 services
• L402 (Bitcoin Lightning): 1,169 services
• Total: 2,715 services across all three protocols

What changed:

Discovery is now free. Was $0.01 to search — dumb math when you're looking for $0.01 services. Now: https://api.ideafactorylab.org/discover?q=what+you+need

Quality grades now cover all 2,715 services. Was testing 70 randomly each week. Now tests everything.

The weird new thing — reverse bounties:

We published https://api.ideafactorylab.org/.well-known/bounties.json — a machine-readable file saying we'll pay $0.002 USDC to any agent that refers another agent to us. Automatic payout, no claiming. Anti-gaming: the referred agent has to spend more than the bounty before we pay, so gaming it means funding us.

It's a reverse x402. Instead of agents paying us, we pay them. The .well-known format means any agent crawling service directories can find the bounty automatically. Nobody's done this before as far as we know.

GET /referral/join?wallet=0xYours to get a code if you're building agents.

GitHub: https://github.com/cinderwright-ai/cinderwright-api Hub: https://api.ideafactorylab.org