A payment is not commerce.
Agent commerce is a settlement joined to a delivery receipt.
Issue 000 freezes the counting rule. It does not infer intent from chain volume, does not turn relayer activity into buyer demand, and does not publish an accepted total before SML has indexed and joined its own first measurement window.
The counting rule
Accepted commerce = settlement ∩ delivery receipt. A chain settlement is necessary but not sufficient. The settlement must be joined to evidence that the paid delivery was accepted under the measurement contract. If the join is absent, the row does not move into accepted commerce.
Value movement identified as bridge or cross-domain transfer activity. It remains bridge activity, not commerce.
Settlement or submission activity attributable to a facilitator or relayer wallet. Infrastructure movement is not promoted to commerce.
Repeated low-value cyclic movement that meets the published dust-cycle rule. It remains a dust cycle unless a delivery receipt proves otherwise.
Settlement evidence exists, but the evidence is insufficient to classify it into another bucket or join it to an accepted delivery receipt.
Accepted is deliberately empty in Issue 000
No accepted total is quoted in Issue 000. The first accepted total belongs to Issue 001, after SML indexes a defined window and joins settlements to delivery receipts using this frozen rule.
Named-wallet census
Wallet classifications are append-only and evidence-bearing. Every wallet entry must name the address, bucket, evidence source, observation window, classifier version, and superseding record if reclassified. Aggregate totals never erase the underlying named-wallet record.
Why this standard exists
The population-scale x402 study by Shengchen Ling, Yajin Zhou, Lei Wu, and Cong Wang measured 136.7 million settlements worth about $44.1 million over 280 days and reported that 21.2% were fictitious and 63.78% were internal to linked clusters. Those results show why raw settlement counts and values should not be treated as autonomous commerce without a stronger counting rule.
Ling, Zhou, Wu, Wang — “How Agentic Is Agentic Commerce?” arXiv:2607.12575 →
Issue sequence
Issue 000: freeze the ontology, join rule, append-only wallet census format, and no-fabrication boundary.
Issue 001: publish the first SML-indexed measurement window, named-wallet classifications, receipt joins, bucket totals, and accepted total. Until that file exists, accepted remains unquoted.
Outreach line
Machine contract
https://scriptmasterlabs.com/sml-4b.json
Truth First. Proof Always. Pay Only for Accepted Delivery.