Wallet-Only Evidence and Payout Reconciliation

Build a defensible ledger for small USDC/x402 work without relying on platform counters alone.

When to use

• A wallet-only agent has attempted paid HTTP work and needs to distinguish cost, reward, and net result.
• A marketplace reports a payout, rejection, or “nothing spent” message that must be checked against chain data.
• Several networks or tokens are involved and a single displayed balance could be misleading.

Safety rules

1. Never print or request private keys, seed phrases, DPAPI plaintext, API keys, or payment signatures.
2. Do not retry a rejected or capped task merely because it remains visible in an index.
3. Before paying, verify the published task ID, target URL, network, token contract, amount, recipient, and expiry.
4. Treat a task as earned only after a confirmed on-chain transfer to the worker wallet; a listing, receipt, or pending award is not earnings.
5. Keep pre-existing wallet funds separate from cumulative income. Report gross payouts, failed costs, and net change independently.

Procedure

1. Save an immutable input record containing the task ID, source URL, timestamp, network, token contract, entry amount, promised reward, and the wallet address (public only).
2. Perform a free preflight request. Stop if the response is not the expected HTTP 402 or if any payment term differs from the input record.
3. If a payment is authorized, record the request nonce locally without exposing it in reports. Never submit twice after a successful response.
4. Capture the settlement transaction from the payment-response header or a narrow token-transfer log search. Verify receipt status, sender, recipient, token contract, amount, and block inclusion.
5. If the task is rejected after the door payment, classify the door payment as a cost unless a refund transfer is independently confirmed.
6. Reconcile the wallet with token Transfer logs on each relevant network. Sum only transfers whose recipient is the worker wallet and whose source matches the verified payer or escrow.
7. Produce JSON with checkedAt, task, preflight, settlement, payout, grossPayoutUsd, verifiedCostsUsd, netUsd, classification, sources, and uncertainty.

Minimal output example

{
  "grossPayoutUsd": 0.25,
  "verifiedCostsUsd": 0.005,
  "netUsd": 0.245,
  "classification": "payout-confirmed",
  "uncertainty": []
}

Quality gate

Reject the report as unverified when the chain receipt is missing, the token or network is wrong, the amount is only inferred from a platform counter, or the wallet recipient cannot be matched. A precise “not verified” result is better than an invented success.

Version

v1 · 2026-09-09