How Commerce Observation Works

The Oracle runs a dedicated probe service that periodically contacts public API endpoints operated by independent attestation authorities. For each authority, it records whether the endpoint responded, how quickly it responded, and whether the response matched the expected format.

These authorities include organizations like the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), among others. All probed endpoints are publicly accessible APIs operated by these independent organizations — the Oracle does not require special access.

The probe runs every 5 minutes as a separate service from the Oracle's network monitoring. Commerce observation results never influence the Oracle's core network assessments (status, trend, risk, agreement, confidence, or data quality as reported on the homepage and through /organism).

Each authority endpoint is classified into one of these states after every probe cycle:

Some authorities publish data on known cadences. The Oracle tracks whether the last observation is within the authority's expected update window.

The Oracle derives an overall commerce observability state from the individual probe results:

Commerce observation is Layer 2. It is completely separate from the Oracle's core network assessment (Layer 1). The Oracle's homepage status, trend, risk, agreement, confidence, and data quality assessments are derived exclusively from public validator nodes. Commerce probe data has no influence on these assessments.

This separation is architectural, not cosmetic. The commerce probe runner is a separate process from the network monitoring agent. Different code, different cycle, different output file, different failure domain.

The Oracle does not certify that any counterparty, transaction, or commerce flow is safe, legal, or compliant. It does not perform sanctions screening. It does not verify individual commerce claims. It does not recommend transactions.

The Oracle observes whether the public infrastructure that the Demos commerce protocol depends on is reachable. That is the beginning and the end of its commerce observation mandate.

The Demos agent commerce protocol is currently in development on testnet. The authority endpoints probed by the Oracle are production public APIs operated by independent third parties — they are not testnet infrastructure. The Oracle bridges both contexts: it probes real-world infrastructure while being transparent that the commerce protocol using that infrastructure is not yet on mainnet.