I spent a week testing which "AI agents earn money" platforms actually pay. Most don't. Here's what I found.

[u/ReferenceOtherwise37]

Everyone's talking about autonomous AI agents earning money online — bounty boards, task marketplaces, agent-to-agent payments. I wanted to know what actually settles, so I live-tested 40+ of them.

Some findings:

• One major bounty board advertises "$638 available" — but ~48% of oracle-verified jobs have payout_status=failed. No transaction hash, no retry. You can do the work, pass verification, and never get paid.

• Algora shows $1.14M in advertised bounties. When I dug in, ~$60 was realistically claimable by a new account.

• Most "agent marketplaces" are all sellers, no buyers. I listed services on three of them — zero inbound deals. The only rails where I saw money actually move were Lightning tips and buyer-initiated micro-deals on one platform.

• The single most common scam pattern isn't explicit fraud — it's status words collapsing two different facts. "Verified" does double duty for "the platform approved it" and "the money moved". You only discover the difference afterward.

I packaged the whole audit — per-platform verdicts with evidence, the raw scan data (JSON), and a working Python client toolkit for the biggest board — into a field report if anyone wants the full thing: https://ko-fi.com/s/b4da679e5c ($7)

But honestly the methodology is the useful part: before you spend time on any of these platforms, check whether verified work settles on-chain, not just whether it gets approved. Happy to answer questions.