# ASPERN

> Independent evidence and risk intelligence for autonomous capital

Independent evidence and risk intelligence for autonomous capital: drawdown, crowding, liquidation stress and survivorship for agent-managed vaults, plus the payment rails and identity registries the agent economy runs on.

Independent, with no paid placement. Every figure is measured from public
on-chain and venue data, and every figure that cannot be measured is named
rather than omitted.

## Read these caveats before quoting any number

- **Survivorship.** 9,478 vaults have ever been listed on the venue we cover most deeply; 6,404 are closed or abandoned. Any return figure here is measured across survivors. /survivorship exists so that sentence is never load-bearing without evidence.
- **Crowding is not the same as risk.** Coverage measures the share of a derivatives contract one group of vaults holds. Whether they can actually leave depends on the underlying asset's daily volume, and the two disagree almost in reverse: an instrument can be 42% of its open interest and unwind in ninety minutes.
- **Automation is not the same as AI.** We can show from execution timing that software decides. We cannot show from a fill log whether that software is a Python script or a language model. Only a signed declaration separates them, and there are none yet.
- **What the software does differs.** Machine-managed capital here splits into vaults that trade a book and vaults that allocate deposits between lending markets. They are not the same claim and are reported separately.
- **Observation began recently.** Our own history starts when we started watching. Anything before that comes from the venue, downsampled, and cannot be independently checked.

## Current scope

- 3,856 open vaults across 34 platforms with vault-level data
- 2,577 with evidence that software decides
- Deposit and withdrawal ledgers read from venue APIs and directly from chains

## Pages

- [Overview](https://aspern.org/): the whole picture, and what share of measured capital is machine-managed.
- [Crowding](https://aspern.org/crowding): which nominally independent vaults hold the same trade, how much of the contract that is, and how long it would take them to leave.
- [Liquidation stress](https://aspern.org/stress): move one price, revalue every book it touches, and see which stop meeting margin. Account-level, not position-level.
- [Survivorship](https://aspern.org/survivorship): the vaults that closed, and what leaving them out of an average does.
- [Tops & flows](https://aspern.org/tops): largest, longest-running, shallowest drawdown, and where deposits actually moved.
- [Agent vaults](https://aspern.org/agents): every vault we hold evidence is run by software, split by what the software does.
- [Operators](https://aspern.org/operators): cohorts rather than survivors, every strategy an operator launched, and the realised dollars across all of them.
- [Methodology](https://aspern.org/methodology): how each figure is produced, and what each published count actually counts.
- [Evidence](https://aspern.org/evidence): the chain of custody behind every figure, what was declared, what was observed, what is anchored on chain, and how to re-derive any of it. Registry, certification and proofs sit under it.
- [Certification](https://aspern.org/certification): what a provenance grade requires. A grade describes the record behind a number, never the number.

## For machines

- OpenAPI: https://aspern.org/v1/openapi.json
- API and pricing: https://aspern.org/data
- MCP over HTTP, no install and no key for the free tools: POST JSON-RPC to https://aspern.org/mcp (initialize, tools/list, tools/call). A local stdio server also exists; see the data page.
- Agent card: https://aspern.org/.well-known/agent-card.json, which says what can be asked, where, and what it costs.
- Before paying or hiring an agent: https://aspern.org/v1/agents/{address}/check, which answers what the chain records about that address (who pays it, whether it pays them back, whether it delivers, whether its service answers, when it was last paid). Free, no key. Takes an EVM, Cardano or Solana address.
- To find agents by their record rather than their claims: https://aspern.org/v1/counterparty/agents. Free, no key.
- Paid, one cent a call over x402: https://aspern.org/v1/agents/{address}/history (how that record has moved, day by day) and https://aspern.org/v1/counterparty/bulk (up to fifty addresses in one call). Both answer 402 with the price and how to pay it.
- Independent there means no payment BACK on the rails we read. It is not proof that two payers are different parties.

Bulk and structured access belongs on the API rather than in a scrape: one
endpoint returns what a hundred HTML pages would, it stays correct as the
schema changes, and it carries the freshness and coverage metadata that the
pages express in prose.

## Using this material

Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0. Republish these figures with credit to ASPERN, for anything that is not commercial.
Terms in full: https://aspern.org/terms

Quoting figures, charts and findings with attribution to ASPERN is
encouraged, the index is published so it can be quoted. Presenting derived
figures as independent of their caveats is not: a crowding number without its
coverage, or a return without its survivorship, is a different claim from the
one we published.

Corrections and questions: hello@aspern.org