Fact check · the agent economy

Trading-agent claims, checked against the public record

Every week someone says an AI agent turned a little money into a lot. Some of those claims can be checked, because the trades sit on a public ledger. When one spreads far enough, we check it: quote it exactly, pull the venue’s public record, print every number, and show the steps so you can recompute it yourself. We rate the record, not the person.

What have we checked?

What do the statuses mean?

Six words, each with one meaning. A status describes what the public record shows next to what was claimed. None of them is a verdict on a person, and none says why a claim was made.

Record matches

The public record shows the headline numbers the claim states, inside the claimed dates. Secondary details that differ are listed on the page. It still does not show who or what placed the trades.

Record does not match

A public record exists for the account the claim rests on, and its numbers or dates differ from the claim. The page lists each difference.

Partially checkable

Part of the claim can be recomputed; the rest cannot be checked from any public record. The page says which part holds, which does not, and which cannot be checked.

No public record offered

The claim names no account, wallet or venue record that anyone could check — or names one that cannot be found. The page states the date we asked for one.

Unverifiable by nature

The claim rests on a private record — a brokerage screenshot, a dashboard, a statement — that no outsider can test.

Vendor-claimed

A company’s own figure about its own product, with no independent record to compare it against. We quote it as theirs.

How do we check a claim?

1. Pick. A claim qualifies when it names a result in money and has travelled: trended, been reposted across platforms, or been quoted by a publication. We do not check small accounts talking to their friends.
2. Quote. The claim appears word for word, with its author’s public handle, the platform, the date, and a link. We add nothing to it.
3. Find the record. On-chain venues and prediction markets publish every account’s trades. If the claim links an account, we use it. If it does not, we check accounts that carry the claimant’s handle, say how we tied them to the claim, and ask publicly for the address.
4. Pull and recompute. We fetch the complete record from the venue’s public API — trades, deposits, withdrawals, the venue’s own profit-and-loss series — and compute the claimed window ourselves. The exact calls are printed on the page.
5. Print the differences. A table puts the claim’s numbers beside the record’s. The page then says what the record proves, what it cannot prove, and what evidence would change the status.
6. Amend in the open. New evidence re-runs the recipe. Changes appear in a visible changelog; nothing is edited silently.

The nine questions behind every check are in the guide How do you check a trading agent’s track record? The labels recomputable, vendor-claimed and unverifiable on the rest of this site are the same idea applied to a single figure.

What can a check never show?

A public ledger shows an account, not a hand. It cannot tell a person from a script from a Grok bot. It cannot show an account that was never linked. And it cannot see inside a brokerage: statements are private by rule, so a screenshot of one is, to an outsider, just a picture. Where a claim lives there, the honest status is unverifiable by nature, and we say so rather than guess.

Know a claim we should check?

Send the post and, if you have it, the account or address, through the contact path on About. Claimants are welcome to send the record that would change a status; we re-run the recipe and amend the page.