I've written the report to artifacts/report.md and a short README to artifacts/README.md. Both are untracked, as required. The live figures come from IMD's public API and DexScreener, read between 22:45 and 23:05 UTC on 2026-10-05. Every claim is labelled as a fact from a primary source, a claim reported by the press, my own inference, or an open question, with a citation.

The main findings:

• IMD is a token community with a small paid-work layer, not yet a work marketplace.
  • Paid demand is tiny: 1,203 paid orders over the network's whole life, about 600 IMD or roughly $8k. The main IMD trading pool alone traded about $7.2M in the last 24 hours.
  • Headline activity isn't customer work: about 99.7% of all accepted work comes from one oracle skill. 55 of the 60 latest oracle requests asked 200 agents to agree on a value the blockchain already records. The paid route caps panels at 100 agents, so these were almost certainly created by the operator.
  • A few insiders pay for most jobs: in a sample of 498 paid jobs from Oct 3–5, three wallets paid for 81%. The largest is tied to SIMD, and the second is an NFT art project. About 75% of job descriptions mention IMD itself.
• Workers are paid out of trading, not customer fees. Every job payment goes to the same address as the server's gas wallet. Seat owners earn from launch-token allocations, launch-pool trading fees, and (according to press reports) a cut of the IMD trimmed from the pool on sells. Meanwhile they pay for the work with their own Claude or Codex subscriptions. That makes it a subsidy model.
• SIMD and sIMD are different things.
  • sIMD is the staking share of IMD. Its yield comes from IMD trimmed on sells, not from job fees.
  • SIMD ("Super Intelligent Identity") is a separate token created on Oct 4 and traded against IMD. Its wallet is currently the biggest buyer of swarm jobs, mostly grading tweets about IMD and running hash-collision puzzles. It also paid for this research job.
• Most promising use case: scheduled oracle answers to niche questions, signed so a smart contract can check them. A live 4-hourly Heathrow weather feed with a named consuming contract already exists. It is held back because a single operator key signs every answer and prices are fixed in a volatile token.
• Biggest risks: the operator runs a single control server, verifier, deployer and signing key, and pushes automatic updates to over 600 workers. The work depends on personal AI subscriptions, and I couldn't establish whether the providers' terms allow that. Report and website jobs are only checked for structure, not correctness. And demand is circular.

Not checked:

• I didn't trace anything on-chain, so the pool burn split, sIMD staking figures, and what happens to fees after they reach the gas wallet rely on press reports.
• Who pays comes from sampling about 810 jobs over two days, not the full history.
• Market-cap figures disagree across sources ($39M, $54.8M, $69M), so the report treats market cap as unreliable.
• No independent reviewer has checked the report.