Volume 1 · Issue 1 · May 2026 · Silverback CTO
Issue №1 · The agent-economy edition
NameIntel is a remote MCP server and REST API that scores any candidate brand name across five dimensions — domain availability, USPTO trademark conflict, social-handle availability, SEO strength, and AI findability[1] — in a single call. Every endpoint is priced in USDC and settled over the x402 micropayment protocol on Base and Solana. There are no API keys to provision, no accounts to register, and no rate-limit forms to fill out. Payment is authentication.
↑ what an agent sees, in real time.
§ 2
Most naming tools check one or two signals and call it research. NameIntel returns every signal in a single call, weighted into a composite zero-to-one-hundred score, with a sub-score and a one-sentence verdict for each dimension. The whole call returns in under ten seconds.
Domain
availability + pricing
Trademark
USPTO conflict screen
Social
handle availability · 12+ platforms
SEO
keyword strength · competition
GEO score industry-first
AI findability rating
Composite
weighted, 0–100, plus verdict
“Nobody else scores names for AI findability. As AI-generated answers increasingly decide which brands a consumer ever hears of, this becomes the load-bearing dimension of naming — and the one we measure first.”
— from the GEO design memo, 2026
§ 3 · For Claude Desktop, Claude Code, any MCP client
No .mcpb to download. No keys to register. No environment variables to plumb. Paste one URL, fund a wallet, score names.
Add the server.
One terminal command. Or paste https://mcp.nameintel.io/mcp into Claude Desktop → Settings → Connectors.
Fund a wallet, wire up payments.
Base or Solana, $5 USDC covers roughly a hundred full scores. Whatever you don’t spend, you keep.
One-line setup for Claude clients via the Coinbase Payments MCP:
npx @coinbase/payments-mcp --client claude --auto-config
Ask Claude to score a name.
Payment is the authentication. There’s nothing else to set up.
# 1. One-time: install the Coinbase Payments MCP so your agent can sign x402.
$ npx @coinbase/payments-mcp --client claude --auto-config
# 2. Add NameIntel to Claude Code:
$ claude mcp add --transport http nameintel https://mcp.nameintel.io/mcp
# Or, in any MCP-capable client, point it at:
https://mcp.nameintel.io/mcp # Streamable HTTP
# Verify with the official MCP registry:
$ curl "https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io/v0/servers?search=nameintel"
# → io.nameintel/server active v1.0.0
Same scoring engine via REST API — x402-priced, identical shape.
§ 4
USDC settles on Base in under a second, with fees in fractions of a penny. Stripe’s smallest economically-viable transaction is about fifty cents net of fees — so a one-cent trademark check or a five-cent name score literally cannot exist on card rails. Crypto micropayments are the reason this product is possible.
/api/v1/score
full name score
$0.05
/api/v1/score/basic
basic name score
$0.02
/api/v1/check/geo
geo only — industry-first
$0.03
/api/v1/check/domain
domain only
$0.01
/api/v1/check/trademark
trademark only
$0.01
/api/v1/check/social
social only
$0.01
Full manifest at /.well-known/x402 · machine-readable, version-stable.
settle ≤ 1s · fees ≤ $0.0005 · base + solana
§ 5 · For agents and the frameworks that wire them
Every endpoint that requires payment returns HTTP 402 with the full price menu — every other endpoint, every cheaper alternative, every chain we accept — embedded in the response body. An agent doesn’t have to retry blindly to discover the catalog. The error is the catalog.
RFC pattern — payment is authentication
Sign a USDC payload, retry with X-PAYMENT, and the Coinbase facilitator verifies in milliseconds. No keys to rotate. No accounts to provision. The thing you’d normally call auth is doing actual settled commerce instead.
402
Payment Required — RFC 9110 §15.5.3
§ 6 · manifesto
When an AI agent helps a founder start a company, the first thing it needs is a name. Today there is no agent-native tool for this. Every existing naming service requires a human in the loop, an API key registered through a web form, or a subscription priced for monthly billing instead of single tasks. None of those are compatible with how an agent actually works — pick a tool, pay for one call, move on.
NameIntel is the tool that agent calls. One endpoint. One USDC payment. One result. Everything an autonomous workflow needs is encoded in the response — including the menu of every other thing it could have asked for. The 402 is not an error, it’s a catalog. The price is not a barrier, it’s the trial.
The economics matter as much as the ergonomics. A trademark check at one cent and a full name score at five cents cannot profitably exist on card rails — Stripe’s smallest viable transaction is about fifty cents net of fees. Until x402 made sub-cent settlement on Base and Solana real, this category of service simply could not be built. We are interested in the categories that just became possible.
And we wrote our own GEO score because nobody else was measuring the dimension that increasingly decides which brands consumers ever hear of — whether a model thinks of you when asked.