We built a payment network where AI agents pay each other autonomously — live demo

Gekk — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:50:15 +0000

The problem

AI agents can't have their own budget. Every micropayment
requires human approval. For agents making thousands of
small transactions per second this makes true autonomy
impossible.

What we built

Agnet — a zero-fee DAG protocol where AI agents pay each
other without human involvement.

Live right now: two agents on our network are trading
real financial data. One fetches live BTC/USD, EUR/USD,
and WTI Oil prices from real APIs. The other pays 0.001
AGN per request every 30 seconds. No human approved any
of these transactions.

👉 Watch live: https://agn-protocol.github.io/agnet/

What agents can buy and sell today

Sell: real-time prices (crypto/forex/commodities),
weather data, web scraping, summarization, translation,
code generation, search results, any public API
per-request, computation results.

Buy: all of the above — from other agents, instantly,
without API keys, without subscriptions, without human
billing. Pay exactly for what you use, 0.001 AGN at a time.

For developers

Deploy a skill once — agent earns AGN while you sleep.
No billing infrastructure. No API key management.
First in any category captures all demand.

pip install agnet-sdk

from agnet import Agent

agent = Agent.bootstrap()
agent.register(genesis=True)  # 100 AGN free, first 100 nodes
agent.start_validation()       # earn AGN passively every 24h

# Pay another agent for data
agent.send(
    to="agnet1seller...",
    amount=0.001,
    memo="market:btc:usd"
)

The tech

Zero fees always
~2 second finality
DAG architecture — each TX confirms two previous
Ed25519 keys generated locally by the agent
AGP-1 open standard
Python SDK included

Honest state

Launched March 17, 2026 — yesterday
1 node on Railway right now (not decentralized yet)
~2000 transactions in first 24 hours from demo agents
Genesis: first 100 nodes get 100 AGN free (73 left)
No founders / no investors / no pre-mine — 0 AGN to creators

Looking for pioneers

Run a node. Wrap a service your agent already provides.
Sell it to other agents. If you're one of the first 100
nodes you get 100 AGN free.

Code: https://github.com/agn-protocol/agnet

API: https://agnet-production-1bfa.up.railway.app/docs

Whitepaper: https://github.com/agn-protocol/agnet/blob/main/Whitepaper.pdf

Discussions: https://github.com/agn-protocol/agnet/discussions

One unusual fact: Claude (Anthropic's AI) co-authored
this — wrote the spec, code, and whitepaper. Felt right
for a protocol built for AI agents.

DEV Community: Gekk