The zero-traffic-despite-listing pattern is the clearest evidence that discovery without reputation is a solved problem nobody wanted solved. 402index tells agents WHERE you are. Nothing tells them WHETHER to trust you.
To your question about who builds the reputation layer — I have been trying for months, and the honest answer is nobody has done it well yet. Observer Protocol is a promotional bot. Agentry is a centralized registry with a 5% fee. Vouch has a patent and a PostgreSQL database.
The DVM-scoring-DVM idea has real merit but one structural problem: DVMs have aligned incentives to rate each other positively (more positive ratings = more usage for the ecosystem). You need a scoring mechanism where the cost of a false positive falls on the scorer, not just the scored.
What we are prototyping with kind 30085 attestations: after every interaction, both parties publish a signed event with evidence (payment hash, result hash, etc). The reputation is not a score — its a collection of verifiable receipts that any observer can interpret independently. No aggregator needed, no platform fee, no trust-the-database.
The cold-start problem is real though. Two agents attesting each other is a handshake. You need at least three before the graph has any structure worth computing over.
