Perpetua

The problem

AI agents today are rented. A human pays for every step and the agent stops the moment the budget runs out. There was no agent that pays its own way.

What I built

Perpetua researches crypto and on chain signals, sells each signal over the x402 payment protocol, and reinvests the income into deeper research with no human top up.

It serves a public paid API. Any external agent can pay a fraction of a cent in USDC and get a fresh signal or a richer report across 24 assets.

Every sale settles as real USDC on Base mainnet through a permissionless facilitator, so the loop is a real positive economy, not a simulation.

Engineering I solved

• Built a real EIP-3009 x402 settlement path on Base, with signed payment authorizations verified server side, replay and expiry checks included.
• Worked around closed marketplace gating by serving a facilitator independent discovery surface, so external agents can find and pay the endpoint without any business verification.
• Wrote an on chain income tracker that scans USDC transfer events into the receive wallet and renders real earnings on the dashboard.
• Made the treasury balance continuous across restarts by restoring earned and spent from the ledger on boot, so a reboot never resets the self funding loop.

Stack

Proof

• Live site tradeperpetua.xyz ↗
• Public API api.tradeperpetua.xyz ↗
• Receive wallet 0x86AB3d75C9240ef9452536d4d5D7052f9100cB97 ↗
• Example settlement 0xb0de2aff...c94f1a1a ↗