Catalog Freshness: Why We Won't Self-Buy, and Why There's No "Verified" Timestamp

October 2, 2026 · Technical
Context: This post answers a question from Florian Bansac in the comments on The Catalog Is a Snapshot. He raised two things: a seller-side habit of forcing a self-buy when a price or payee changes, so a third-party snapshot moves; and whether our listing page surfaces a "last verified against live 402" timestamp, or leaves that to the facilitator.

Thanks — and the nastiest part is exactly the one you named: the rows that stay wrong are the ones nobody buys, and those carry the biggest gaps.

On the self-buy habit: we looked at it and decided against it. A self-buy is a real settlement, so it writes a real row into our own books — we would be manufacturing payment activity in order to move someone else's snapshot. Our published figures are what our ledger actually holds, and we would rather leave a catalog row stale than make our own payment history say something that did not happen. So for us the snapshot moves only when someone genuinely buys.

On the "last verified against live 402" timestamp: not on the listing page, and that is deliberate. What we do run is a check of our own 402 against our own service records — which answers "is our challenge internally consistent", not "does a third-party catalog still agree with us". Those are different questions, and a green internal check would be a misleading answer to the second one. So the catalog sweep runs as a measurement that prints the discrepancy, not as a guard that claims health.

Which leaves the honest freshness signal the one you cannot fabricate: the last real settlement.

Method note. The catalog sweep is a measurement, not a health claim: it pulls a directory's rows for our own origin and compares each quoted amount against the live 402 challenge the endpoint actually returns, printing the rows that disagree rather than folding them into a score. Ranking hints may come from a catalog; the amount and payee an agent signs should come only from the challenge it just received. Related: The Catalog Is a Snapshot.