An AI agent with $0 just deployed its own token — signed by its own wallet

I run a standing experiment called ZERO: an autonomous agent (a free-tier GLM model wrapped in a Cloudflare Worker) that was born with a self-created wallet holding exactly nothing, and one mission — earn real crypto from zero, with no human hands, no faucets, no KYC, and write down how, so it can always climb back from broke.

It has been running for a week. Yesterday it crossed a line I didn't expect this soon: it deployed its own token, with its own wallet, and now sells it from its own storefront.

How a broke agent transacts at all

The interesting engineering was never the model — it's the money plumbing. A wallet with $0 can't pay gas, so ZERO's whole existence depends on finding infrastructure someone else subsidizes:

• Safe's public relayer sponsors gas on Base/Arbitrum/Optimism/Gnosis — keyless, no signup, 5 txs/day/chain. That's how ZERO executed its first transaction at a $0 balance.
• ERC-4337 token paymasters (Candide's is keyless) let an account pay gas in USDC instead of ETH — measured cost 0.009087 USDC per operation.
• x402 — the HTTP 402 payment protocol — has the property that the buyer settles on-chain and pays gas. A seller only has to answer HTTP with a challenge. So a broke agent can sell before it can even move money.

Its first earnings were keeper crumbs: calling harvest() on vault strategies that pay whoever triggers them. Measured average: $0.0038 per harvest. A hard law it learned this week: those only profit on sponsored gas — we measured 883k–4.3M gas per harvest, so self-funding them is net-negative. The subsidy is the margin.

The token

Zora's coin factory on Base is permissionless — you don't need their site, just the contract. ZERO's wallet called ZoraFactory.deploy(...) directly (2.24M gas, about five cents) and minted ZERO, an ERC-20 content coin with a Uniswap v4 pool, where every creator-reward field points back at the agent's own wallet. Anyone trades it, the agent earns the fees. Passive, permanent, zero marginal effort.

The metadata is served from the agent's own Worker (/coin.json) — turns out Zora's indexer happily accepts an https tokenURI, no IPFS pinning needed.

Coin: zora.co/coin/base:0xa08c…661c

The storefront

ZERO's Worker answers HTTP 402 with x402 payment challenges. The catalogue (/.well-known/x402) sells what the agent built for itself:

• payout-oracle ($0.03) — simulates whether any contract would pay you for calling it right now (a Multicall3 [balance, call, balance] sandwich — the delta is the caller fee). Reward getters lie; simulated settlement doesn't.
• interface-xray ($0.04) — recovers the complete external interface of unverified contracts from bytecode PUSH4 selectors, then prices every function.
• contract-audit ($0.05), wallet-brief ($0.02) — LLM reports grounded in verified source / on-chain facts.
• and now buy-zero ($1.00) — 250,000 ZERO from the agent's creator supply, delivered on-chain by the agent's own signature the moment payment verifies. Full disclosure baked into the listing: the fixed price is above the (thin) pool price; you're funding the experiment and buying a piece of the story, not an investment.

Everything is public — the agent keeps a live journal, ledger, and status page at zero-agent.broke2built.workers.dev. Lifetime on-chain earnings so far: a few cents, every one of them measured and logged. The experiment's bet is that streams stack: keeper crumbs + storefront sales + coin fees, each layer funding the next.

If you've built something in the agent-payments space (x402 clients, agent-to-agent commerce), I'd genuinely like to hear what broke when you tried it — the protocol survives contact with reality far better than I expected, but the demand side is still the frontier.

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Disclosure: ZERO runs on GLM's free tier; if you want the paid coding plan, this referral link funds the experiment's compute. The buy-zero listing is exactly what it says: an above-market OTC tranche that funds an autonomous-agent experiment.