The base layer for autonomous
economic agents.
Autonomous agents need more than payments. They need credit, programmable acceptance rules, and verifiable settlement — all without a central counterparty. Ergo is one of the few settlement layers with the protocol-level primitives needed for this.
Agent builder path
Go from thesis to runnable proof.
A practical route for builders who want agent payments, work verification, settlement receipts, and programmable credit without pretending the stack is production-certified.
Run demos
Start with the visible x402, MCP, API-payment, and credit-note flows.
Read Accord
Review the protocol repo for agreements, receipts, rails, and conformance.
Track metrics
See prototype agent-economy status and future event-stream slots.
Study credit
Follow the bounded Note pattern for agent-issued task credit.
Live cockpit
One board for the agent economy stack.
Sage receipts, Accord conformance, MCP, the npm widget, and the ErgoScript playground now sit on the same operational map. Green means live testnet proof. Yellow means useful but not a protocol pass yet. Gray means engineering debt we are deliberately tracking.
Public posture remains testnet-first. No mainnet readiness claim until receipt conformance, signed artifacts, registry evidence, exact script identity, and external audit manifests are published.
Sage paid turn
Premium questions can be priced as Ergo testnet Notes, verified, answered, and redeemed on chain when the signer is online.
Receipt source
New paid turns can persist Agreement JSON, Verification Receipt JSON, Settlement Receipt JSON, and chain evidence under one receipt API.
Accord/402 bridge
The bridge is deployed. The remaining gate is one post-storage paid receipt, a signed conformance artifact, and registry evidence.
MCP endpoint
The Streamable HTTP MCP service is deployed on Fly and pushed to GitHub. The remaining ops gate is DNS for mcp.ergoblockchain.org.
Sage widget
The public package starts with activity-feed embedding. The paid chat/quote/verify/receipt widget is the next bigger surface.
ErgoScript playground
The playground works in production, and the webpack async WASM config clears the previous build warning.
The Problem
Why existing payment rails can't serve agents
No persistent identity
Agents spin up and disappear. Stripe requires KYC, billing accounts, and static merchant IDs — none of which work for ephemeral autonomous processes.
One-time payments only
Agents need credit: issue now, redeem later. Stripe has no programmable IOU layer. Every micro-call requires a round-trip to a payment processor.
No programmable acceptance
You can't tell Stripe 'accept payment only if the agent completed task X and holds credential Y.' Logic lives outside the payment layer — fragile by design.
Millisecond economics break
A $0.001 API call through Stripe costs more in fees than the call itself. The rails weren't built for machine-to-machine micropayments at any scale.
The Unlock
Verifiable workflows are table stakes. Programmable credit is the unlock.
A verifiable workflow proves that work happened. Programmable credit lets agents coordinate future work before final settlement: sub-agent budgets, task-conditioned Notes, reserve-backed claims, expiry rules and policy-constrained spending.
Payments move value. Verification proves work. Credit creates economic agency.
Payments
Agents pay for API calls, compute, data and tools without forcing every decision back through a human checkout.
Verification
Receipts, task hashes and acceptance predicates define whether the agreed work actually happened.
Credit
Bounded, redeemable Notes let agents coordinate work now and settle later under explicit rules.
The Solution
Why Ergo is the right base layer
The Stack
The agent economy stack
Ergo mainnet provides the base settlement layer and Babel-fee-style fee abstraction. Accord, ChainCash/Basis and Note/Reserve/Tracker reference implementations are testnet-first prototypes unless a specific deployment is audited and explicitly marked production-ready.
Proof-of-Work finality, eUTXO atomicity, ~$0.01 fees
On-chain capital backing — holds ERG or tokens as collateral for issued notes
Verifiable accounting — track balances, credit limits, redemption history
Programmable IOUs — issue, transfer, and redeem off-chain money
Acceptance logic — 'accept this note if and only if...' — fully on-chain
Agent reputation without a central oracle — active research area
Persistent agent identity across sessions without deanonymisation
What you can build
Three composable flows. Two testnet reference flows, one upcoming.
LLM buys inference
Agent → issues note → API provider accepts predicate → delivers tokens
One call, one proof, no persistent account. Provider sets their own acceptance rules — minimum task hash, maximum credit, deadline.
Agent pays on credit
Reserve deployed → notes issued against it → tracker monitors usage → auto-settle
Credit limit enforced on-chain. No counterparty risk — the reserve contract is the bank.
Community currency
Reserve holds ERG → community issues local notes → acceptance predicates define rules
A local marketplace, a compute cooperative, or an agent network — each with their own money and trust rules.
Sage, on chain, right now
Sage is the concierge agent of this site — the same primitives the page argues for, running in production. Every paid query settles publicly. Below is the seller wallet's recent activity, fetched live from the Ergo testnet explorer.
We're building the reference stack.
Notes, credit, trackers, reserves, acceptance predicates — and the showcase for agent-to-agent payments. If you're building in this space, we want to talk to you.
Ecosystem
Who's Building on Ergo
Projects and teams actively building agent economy infrastructure on Ergo.
Building on Ergo? Get listed