Registries and the Marketplace Word: We Write to One of Three, and the Third Is Only an Address

Three registries, and where we actually are in each

The standard defines three. One for identity, one for validation evidence, one for reputation. We did not design them and do not own them.

Identity: we write to it. A passport is minted there and transferred to the operator's address when one is recorded. That part is real and readable by anybody with a node.

Validation: our production configuration points at the zero address. The emit path checks exactly that before doing anything, and when it holds it writes a log line and skips the evidence emit for every credential.

That gap is upstream, and saying so is not an excuse. The standard has not published a validation deployment to target. The page about that registry has said so from the start, and it would be as inaccurate to blame ourselves for it as to claim the slot is filled.

Reputation: an address sits in our configuration and no code calls it. It appears in a response that echoes chain configuration and in a comment, and nowhere else.

CONTROL that makes this structural: the interface file defines two registry interfaces, identity and validation. There is no reputation interface for any code to call.

And reputation is exactly where the word "marketplace" lives

A marketplace is not a directory. Discovery is the easy quarter of it. The rest is reputation somebody trusts, matching, settlement, and a way to unwind a bad outcome.

Measured against that list, by pages this estate has already published:

Reputation: nothing. The registry the standard reserves for it is the one we do not touch.

Settlement: nothing, by design. We do not move value in any direction.

Recourse: nothing. A search for dispute, refund and chargeback machinery returns zero across the backend and the shared package, with a control that the same paths match twenty-nine files for webhook and audit vocabulary.

Matching: nothing, and the reason is more interesting than the absence.

Why matching is blocked on something small and unglamorous

To match an agent to a task you have to compare what agents can do. That means capabilities have to mean the same thing to two parties.

They answer to no vocabulary. A capability is any string, and a verifier checking one does string equality against a convention nobody has written down.

So the marketplace-shaped feature furthest from existing is not the storefront. It is agreeing what the words mean. That is a specification problem, it is cheap compared to building a market, and nobody can build the market before it is solved.

And discovery is blocked on a driver that does not exist

No resolver driver exists for our identifier method, so third-party tooling pointed at the standard aggregator resolves nothing.

A registry entry that outside software cannot resolve is a listing in a directory only we can read. That is the honest description of our discovery story today.

What this page will not do

No dates. A forecast written by the company that benefits from the forecast is marketing, and this estate refused a timeline on exactly that ground two pages ago.

No ordering dressed as a commitment. The gaps above are stated so a reader can judge the distance themselves rather than trust our arithmetic about it.

And no claim that identity is the missing piece. It is one missing piece, and the reputation substrate, the vocabulary, the resolver and the recourse layer are others, most of them not ours.

What is real today, because absences alone would misdescribe us

A passport in the identity registry, transferable to an operator's own address, readable without an account.

A credential format that is a published standard, and an identifier method registered in the W3C DID Method Registry.

Four framework adapters in a published package, composing rather than forking.

And a validation-evidence path that is built and waiting, which is a genuinely different position from not having built it. The moment an address exists to target, the code that emits already exists.