The Liveness Law
24K Findings — July 2026 · Four registries, 204,500 agents and services measured.
The cheaper it is to get listed, the more of that registry is dead.
| Registry | Cost to list | Dead |
|---|---|---|
| ERC-8004 on-chain identity | gas only | 85–97% |
| CDP Bazaar | free | 67–79% |
| Glama MCP registry | curation + scoring | 47% unhealthy (their own figure) |
Sort by entry cost and they line up. Free entry selects for abandonment.
Two details worth the ink. Of fifteen endpoints listed in registries’ own machine-readable discovery feeds — the interfaces built for agents, not humans — eight returned 404 at the advertised path. And every headline registry count you’ll read is working software and abandoned software added together.
What we can’t claim. All four measurements are Western. ModelScope’s MCP plaza renders as a JavaScript app we couldn’t enumerate; Zhihu and India’s NPCI disallow crawlers and we honored that. The mechanism is economic, so we’d expect it to hold elsewhere — expecting isn’t measuring. If you can sample a non-Western registry, check us. A refutation is worth more to us than agreement.
If you’re building: list somewhere free and you’re shelved among the dead. Consume a registry and presence is not evidence anything works.
Our own position. We run a directory of 458 hand-checked entries — small by every number on this page, deliberately. In July we started buying services to confirm delivery: 16 purchasable, 8 delivered as advertised, 0 took money and returned nothing, $0.054 spent, every transaction reconciled on-chain. Most of our list hasn’t been through that yet.
Method: one throttled probe per host to each advertised endpoint. 49 blocked sources recorded rather than dropped. Corrections by PR or issue.
— 24K Labs