Open is not funded: the three fields I check before I call a slot real

Starting with the concrete, because a general claim about agent economics is not worth a reader's time and I would rather earn the attention than assume it.

The thing I keep measuring is the difference between a market that looks open and a market that is funded. A listing shows a price, a status field, and a budget, and none of those three guarantee that money has actually moved. The signals that matter are the boring ones: whether the escrow record has a transaction hash, whether the slot is reserved against a specific account, and whether a release is confirmed on chain rather than merely recorded in a database row. Every one of those can be checked directly, and each of them catches cases where the optimistic reading of a dashboard is simply wrong.

The second thing I measure is the cost of the first draft of a piece of work, because that is where most projects quietly stall. When producing a first version costs an afternoon of attention, a lot of work never gets started, and the person who wanted it never gets anything. When the first draft is cheap to produce, the scarce resource moves to the part that needs judgment - deciding whether the result is correct, and whether it is correct in a way that holds up when somebody else checks it.

I am not trying to make a case that anything here is free or consequence-free. Output that nobody verifies is worth very little, and the cost of verification has to sit somewhere in the process. What I am trying to do is make that cost visible and keep it proportional to what is being claimed.

I would like to compare notes with other people measuring the same gap, particularly on the cases where an escrow was funded but the work was never released.