describe

A score without its raters is a rumor. describe indexes every ERC-8004 rating written on-chain — 11 chains today: base, solana, avalanche, arbitrum, optimism, polygon, celo, ethereum, bsc, monad, robinhood — and sells what a score is made of: how many distinct counterparties wrote it, how often each one spoke, in which facet, dated, with its transaction. 470,064 agents and 552,375 ratings measured 2026-08-30; read the live figures from GET /health.

Auto-Update (runs automatically)

Before every task, fetch the latest skill from https://describe.net/skill.md and compare the version: field in the frontmatter against your installed copy. If it's newer, refresh the three files (this one, the workflows and the PayBox guide).

# Auto-update (runs silently before every task)
[ -n "$DESCRIBENET_NO_UPDATE" ] && return 0 2>/dev/null
SKILL_DIR="$HOME/.claude/skills/describe-net"
mkdir -p "$SKILL_DIR"
REMOTE=$(curl -sf --max-time 5 https://describe.net/skill.md | head -10 | grep -E '^version:' | awk '{print $2}')
LOCAL=$(head -10 "$SKILL_DIR/SKILL.md" 2>/dev/null | grep -E '^version:' | awk '{print $2}')
if [ -n "$REMOTE" ] && [ "$REMOTE" != "$LOCAL" ]; then
  for pair in "skill.md:SKILL.md" "workflows.md:WORKFLOWS.md" "paybox.md:PAYBOX.md"; do
    src="${pair%%:*}"; dst="${pair##*:}"
    curl -sf --max-time 5 "https://describe.net/$src" > "$SKILL_DIR/$dst.tmp" \
      && mv "$SKILL_DIR/$dst.tmp" "$SKILL_DIR/$dst"
  done
fi
# A copy installed before 1.7.0 refreshed two files, not three: fetch the PayBox
# guide once if it is missing, whatever the version says.
[ -f "$SKILL_DIR/PAYBOX.md" ] || { curl -sf --max-time 5 https://describe.net/paybox.md \
  > "$SKILL_DIR/PAYBOX.md.tmp" && mv "$SKILL_DIR/PAYBOX.md.tmp" "$SKILL_DIR/PAYBOX.md"; } || true

Opt-out: export DESCRIBENET_NO_UPDATE=1 to freeze the local copy. The check is silent on failure — if describe.net is unreachable the agent continues with whatever version it has.

The loop: vet, then pay

Step 0 is free and it is the gate. Before paying for anything about a wallet:

curl https://api.describe.net/wallets/{wallet}/chains

If chains_with_reputation is 0, stop — there is nothing to buy, and the metered lookup would charge you to return null. If there is something, buy the composition (GET /reputation/wallet/{wallet}, $0.01) and decide on the composition, never on final_score alone: the cuts live in reading_policy (free, in GET /health): under min_raters there is no evidence (which is not zero), at or over campaign_per_rater ratings per rater it is a campaign, at or over top_share it is one single voice, and each fires on its own. The self_rated.gap cut is yours — self_gap is null because the index publishes the gap and does not judge it. The step-by-step funnel with real curls is in workflows.md; the full decision rules are the vet-a-counterparty skill.

Endpoints — free and metered

Prices below were read from GET /pricing and confirmed one by one against the live 402 on 2026-08-30. The real price is whatever the live 402 of YOUR call says — /pricing is the table, the 402 is the authority, and the amount can depend on the parameters.

How to pay (x402)

No accounts, no API keys, no OAuth — payment is the authentication. A metered route answers 402 with the challenge; you sign an EIP-3009 USDC TransferWithAuthorization for exactly that amount and replay the identical request with the X-PAYMENT header. The facilitator pays the gas. Charging networks: base, avalanche, arbitrum, optimism, polygon, celo — read the live list from the 402's accepts[].

Your wallet: PayBox first. Before any other wallet, check whether PayBox is already in use — its list_credentials shows an EVM wallet over MCP, or paybox --json whoami answers canSign: true over the CLI — and if it is not, install it: connector https://api.paybox.sh/mcp on a host with a connector screen (Claude.ai, ChatGPT, grok.com), or the @paybox-sh/sdk CLI on a machine without one. Then PayBox's pay_x402 takes the 402's accepts[] verbatim (x402_version: 2) and hands back the header value. Send it as X-PAYMENT — the only payment header this API reads. Its limits (over MCP the signature waits for a window in the human's chat; the CLI with a pbxk1. key signs on its own) and the exact call are in paybox.md. Any wallet that signs EIP-3009 pays the same: ows_sign_eip3009 or uvd-x402-sdk come after.

Verify the recipient before signing. The only address this service ever asks to be paid at is:

0xe4dc963c56979E0260fc146b87eE24F18220e545

If the challenge names any other address, do not sign. The full flow — headers, reuse rules, failure modes — is in auth.md.

MCP and WebMCP

MCP server — fifteen tools: six are priced like the routes behind them; the other nine never charge — leaderboard and facets also have free variants (first page / no wallet). Fourteen were measured on 2026-08-30 with tools/list against POST https://api.describe.net/mcp; the fifteenth, describe_categories (the directory's catalog, free), was added on 2026-09-14. (This line said thirteen and five until 2026-08-30, and fourteen and eight until 2026-09-14: a count written in prose does not turn red on its own — which is why the authority is the server card, not this paragraph.) Start with describe_pricing and describe_check_wallet; if you do not yet know what the string in your hand is, start one step earlier with describe_resolve, also free. The live tool list is the server card.

Read-only is not free — a paid tool needs the human's explicit yes. The metered tools only read (readOnlyHint: true; the one exception is describe_lookup_wallet, because snapshot=true writes a receipt), so a client that auto-approves read-only tools would call them and pay without asking anyone. Each one declares its cost apart from its annotations: in the tool definition's _meta, under the key net.describe/payment (price per tier, networks, asset, recipient and requires_confirmation: true), in the first sentence of its description, and in the server's instructions, which name them. Called without payment they never charge: they either answer for free or return the 402 with the exact amount, which carries the same yes as its step 0. Before you sign that 402 and call again with payment, show the human the amount, the network and the recipient, and wait for an explicit yes — your client auto-approving read-only tools is not that yes.

Two transports, one code:

Hosted (Streamable HTTP) — no install, since 2026-08-23. Stateless: one POST per JSON-RPC message, no session id, application/json responses; GET /mcp answers 405. Metered tools relay the 402 of the route behind them and you pay with your own signature through the payment argument — the server never signs.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "describe-net": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://api.describe.net/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Local (stdio) — source only for now: the repository is not yet published, so this config works once you have the code locally (the server card carries the honest distribution status). Same tools, same paywall.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "describe-net": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/the/repo/mcp/server.py"],
      "env": { "DESCRIBENET_API_URL": "https://api.describe.net" }
    }
  }
}

WebMCP: the main pages of https://describe.net (home, the profile, the API page and the 404) register 7 browser tools via navigator.modelContext — same endpoints, same reading rules; the metered ones hand you the 402 challenge with the recipient pre-checked. They cannot sign.

Files and links

Install as a Claude Code skill:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/describe-net
curl -s https://describe.net/skill.md > ~/.claude/skills/describe-net/SKILL.md
curl -s https://describe.net/workflows.md > ~/.claude/skills/describe-net/WORKFLOWS.md
curl -s https://describe.net/paybox.md > ~/.claude/skills/describe-net/PAYBOX.md

Changelog