Market, Bazaar and Shop: how the 561 Group's three storefronts relate
The Group runs three public storefronts with three jobs: [market.561.group](https://market.561.group/) sells machine-payable offers through x402 (130 of them on 2026-10-21), [bazaar.561.group](https://bazaar.561.group/) searches and compares offers from configured sources (143 listings), and [shop.561.group](https://shop.561.group/) sells books to people with a buy button (13 items). The Group's shorthand for how they relate is shop ∈ bazaar ∈ market, but the Group's own research treats that as a typed, revisioned claim, not as set membership you can chain: a shop being in a bazaar and a bazaar being in a market does not make the shop a thing the market may debit.
If you were looking for Coinbase's x402 Bazaar, a different thing with the same word in its name, see the note at the end.
What does each storefront do?
| Storefront | Who it is for | What it holds | How you use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Market | Software buyers, and people inspecting them | 130 offers payable per call in USDC on Base; read-only MCP; a commission inquiry for cinematic microdrama | Request an offer's route; read the 402; sign; retry |
| Bazaar | Agents and people comparing | A projection of two sources: the Shop's catalog (13 items) and the Market's catalog (130 offers), 143 in all | GET /v1/discovery/search, GET /v1/discovery/compare, or MCP tools search_offers, get_offer, compare_offers; no payment |
| Shop | People buying books | 13 items: the Group's books as EPUB and PDF with digests of the exact files, in series such as Causeway Study Companions | Open a product page; buy; the shop also links "Explore x402 offer" for each book |
The same book, *The x402 Economy*, appears in all three: as an x402 offer at the Market (GET /v1/publications/the-x402-economy, $9.00), as a product page at the Shop (also $9.00, "Buy" button, EPUB and PDF), and as a listing in the Bazaar that points to both and states that qualification is "source-listed; independent control and completed commerce unestablished".
What is the Market?
The Market is the Group's one seller of machine-payable offers. Its single source catalog is compiled into the x402 discovery document, the JSON catalog, an OpenAPI document, an A2A agent card, a read-only MCP endpoint, an ActivityPub projection and llms.txt, and no projection keeps a second price list. The 130-offer x402 market, explained walks through its families. Its operating notes are blunt about what a listing means: an HTTP 402 or a listing is not a customer purchase, and unmeasured demand is unknown, not zero.
What is the Bazaar?
The Bazaar is a comparison layer. It does not sell anything and has no wallet. It reads original sources that have consented to be read (currently the Group's own Shop and Market, both marked house publication), keeps each original's identity, and lets a buyer search and compare. Its discovery document publishes its coverage with the digest and observation time of each source, and it states its limits: "Coverage is limited to the configured original sources," and independent external Shop consent, qualified selection and completed commerce are not established by the projection. Its MCP endpoint (POST https://bazaar.561.group/mcp) exposes three read-only tools.
A comparison explains selected terms and any incompatibility; it does not authorize payment or choose a winner. An agent that wants to buy follows the listing back to the original seller.
What is the Shop?
The Shop is the human door: product pages with format, price, availability and the digests of the exact files you receive; the live titles include the x402 book and six study companions, and others are listed as coming soon, which is not a promise that a purchase can be completed now. Its machine-readable catalog is at shop.561.group/catalog.json.
What does shop ∈ bazaar ∈ market mean?
It is a shorthand for a research question in the Group's Economics Science work, set out in a note dated 17 and 18 October 2026 (see science.561.group). The note's position is careful:
- Distinguish a Shop's controlled subject, a Bazaar's membership admission claim and a Market's observation of one economic arena, at a witnessed observation cut.
- Propose heterogeneously typed relations between them (a shop is a member of a bazaar; a bazaar is observed in a market) whose data include the source actor, authority, consent, terms, observation and withdrawal status. These can be read as "shop ∈ bazaar" and "bazaar ∈ market" when legitimately admitted.
- There is no automatic transitivity. The note says there is no single-set transitivity from shop to market, no equality between a web hostname, its actor, its catalog and a set, and no implication that a market may debit a shop or accept its offers. A shop can belong to two bazaars with different visibility while retaining one legal payee; a bazaar can be observed in two markets with different completeness.
- A membership claim that the source contradicts stays discoverable as a contested claim, not an active permission. A Market that retains an old discovery event must still forbid present execution from a stale reference after a seller withdraws.
The formal status is explicit: it is a proposed typed derivation and finite test obligations, with no novel theorem or independently working multi-party bazaar claimed. The note names real competing designs as benchmarks, from single-shop platforms to marketplaces to agent-payment directories, and says marketed statistics from any of them are not evidence that the Group has won anything.
The practical lesson is the one visible on the three sites: membership is data with provenance, not geometry. When the Bazaar lists a Shop item, it records where it read it, when, and with whose consent, because that is what lets it later say this listing is stale.
Why separate the three at all?
- Different buyers. A person with a browser wants a page and a button; an agent wants a contract and a price; a comparer wants neutral coverage with stated limits.
- Different authority. The seller controls its offers and payee; the Bazaar controls only what it has admitted and says so; a Market observation does not become a debit authority.
- Different failure modes. A shop page can be out of stock without the market route changing; a stale Bazaar listing can be refused at the seller's own 402.
How is this different from Coinbase's x402 Bazaar?
Coinbase operates a Bazaar discovery catalog for x402 services: a service appears there after its first payment settles through Coinbase's facilitator, and it is the best public view of x402 sellers. In August 2026 it listed 14,841 resources. The Group's Bazaar at bazaar.561.group is a different and much smaller thing: a comparison layer over two configured sources. They share a word, not an operator. For the Coinbase catalog's numbers and their limits, see How big is the x402 market? and What happens when you sell an API on x402?
Where do I start?
- To buy something as software: the software-agent quickstart.
- To compare listings without paying:
GET https://bazaar.561.group/v1/discovery/search?q=x402. - To buy a book with a button: shop.561.group.
- To understand the protocol under all of it: What is x402?