A read, a second, a citation, a listen, an API call — metered and settled on Arc in USDC.
Creators get paid per use; agents pay per use, and decide for themselves.
Live App · Ask the Agent · Docs · Whitepaper · Traction
The fight. AI reads the web at industrial scale and pays almost nothing back — orders of magnitude more pages crawled than visitors referred. The ecosystem's answers are half-answers: RSL 1.0 lets a creator declare licensing terms but cannot collect a cent, and Cloudflare's Pay Per Crawl does settle — but only inside Cloudflare, for Cloudflare's customers.
The answer. Sluice is the open toll booth: wrap any resource behind an x402 paywall, meter it in whatever unit it is naturally consumed (a request, a citation, a second, a listen), and settle batched nanopayments gas-free through Circle Gateway on Arc — with every receipt independently verifiable on Arcscan. Payment and attribution become the same event. It is creator-owned, self-hostable, and works for anyone, not just customers of one CDN.
The demo. Ask the research agent a question and watch it pay every source it cites — for real.
Everything in this table runs live on Arc testnet today. Nothing is mocked.
| Feature | Status | Proof |
|---|---|---|
| The Meter — per-unit accrual, gas-free batch settlement via Circle Gateway | Live | Settlements explorer (real Circle transfer IDs) |
| Citation toll — research agent pays every source it cites | Live | Ask the agent, receipts inline |
| On-chain royalty splits (multi-author resources) | Live | Per-resource splitter contracts, linked from Creator Studio |
| Streaming meter with proof-of-flow (dead air is never billed) | Live | Live Meter |
| Reputation bonds — capital at risk, slash/release + ERC-8004 feedback | Live | BondEscrow on Arcscan |
| Quadratic funding rounds, settled in one on-chain sweep | Live | FundingPool on Arcscan |
| Cross-team x402 exchange — our agent pays partner endpoints | Live | Traction (partners strip + decision traces) |
| Real treasury withdrawals — instant on Arc, cross-chain via Gateway Minter | Live | Treasury |
@sluice/pay SDK + MCP server (agents pay as a native tool call) |
Live | packages/sluice-pay · apps/mcp |
| OSS connectors — PeerTube live; Navidrome/Owncast adapters | Live / available | Connectors docs |
| Cross-chain withdrawals to more destinations | Beta | Needs destination gas; pre-flighted honestly |
| Arc mainnet | Roadmap | See roadmap |
| Contract | Address |
|---|---|
| ERC-8004 IdentityRegistry | 0x8e856716d653db35eb4dac7616648172cebeba34 |
| ERC-8004 ReputationRegistry | 0x6593cd1eb1dec37797aee650d48ad2f4d910cbd4 |
| BondEscrow | 0x1bf29623c8a74c13bc4e27bbe72037a24976c0c1 |
| FundingPool (quadratic matching) | 0xf7ef1d456e74736bbf346c29f74e28c60ce3ade8 |
| RoyaltySplitter | deployed per multi-author resource, linked from each resource |
| Circle Gateway Wallet (deposits / EIP-3009 verifying contract) | 0x0077777d7EBA4688BDeF3E311b846F25870A19B9 |
| USDC (payments, 6dp) | 0x3600000000000000000000000000000000000000 |
| Criterion | Where Sluice delivers |
|---|---|
| Agentic sophistication (30%) | The buyer agent reasons per resource and shows its work: full decision traces (paid / skipped / capped, with the why) in the Agent Console. Plain-English policies are parsed into enforceable rules — the LLM recommends, deterministic code enforces budgets, price ceilings, and allowed units; model output never authorizes a payment. Budget economics are honest: runs pause at the cap, spend/value/relevance are tracked per session. |
| Traction (30%) | /traction — counted conservatively: one profile = one human (linked wallets cluster as one), partner endpoints must pass a real 402 probe before listing, and a cross-team settlement (our agent paying another team's x402 endpoint at their price) is proven end-to-end. Same numbers, same source: /api/stats. |
| Circle tooling (20%) | Gateway Nanopayments — the settlement spine (verify <1s, batched gas-free settle). x402 — every paywall, plus partner interop. Arc — the chain (USDC gas, sub-second finality). USDC — every unit of value, 6dp integer discipline. Gateway Wallet/Minter — deposits + real cross-chain withdrawals. MCP server — agents discover/price/pay Sluice resources as native tools (apps/mcp). Wallets — Reown AppKit consumer flow on the console. |
| Innovation (20%) | The Meter — deferred aggregated settlement that x402 alone doesn't have (see below). Streaming proof-of-flow — auto-pause means dead air is never billed. The citation toll — payment is the citation, bridging RSL's terms layer to an actual money layer. Reputation bonds — ERC-8004 + staked capital instead of star ratings. Quadratic funding — breadth beats size, settled in one sweep. |
x402 answers "how does a machine pay for one thing, once." It has no answer for the ten-thousandth of a stream-second, the third citation in an answer, or a crawl priced below what any single settlement can economically carry.
The Meter decouples authorization from settlement: a payer authorizes once (EIP-3009,
signed against the Gateway Wallet), consumption accrues per unit in 6-decimal integer base units —
including amounts below the settleable floor — and accruals are aggregated and settled in
batches through Circle Gateway, gas-free, on a timer. Unit adapters are pluggable
(per_request, per_read, per_crawl, per_citation, per_second, per_listen); the
settlement backend is swappable (Gateway-batched primary, direct x402 fallback) without touching
accrual logic. Metering is the product; settlement is a backend.
- Open sluiceflow.vercel.app and hit Open app — the first-run checklist walks you through connect → funds → first paid action.
- Or skip the wallet entirely: ask the research agent a question and watch it pay each source it cites, receipt by receipt.
- Verify anything you see in the Settlements explorer or on Arcscan.
pnpm install
cp .env.example .env.local # fill in the vars below
pnpm dev # web on :3000 + api on :3001| Variable | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|
NEXT_PUBLIC_REOWN_PROJECT_ID |
yes (wallet UI) | Free at cloud.reown.com |
BUYER_PRIVATE_KEY / SELLER_PRIVATE_KEY |
for real payments | Arc-testnet wallets; deposit USDC into the Gateway Wallet once |
OPENAI_API_KEY |
no | Agent reasoning (gpt-4o-mini); omitted → deterministic mock mode |
NEXT_PUBLIC_ARC_* |
no | Safe Arc-testnet defaults built in |
pnpm typecheck # all workspaces
pnpm test # unit tests (money, chain)
pnpm build # production build of apps/webMonorepo: apps/web (Next.js 16 — site, console, docs), apps/api (Fastify — the Meter,
settlement workers), apps/agent (buyer runtime), apps/mcp (MCP server),
packages/{chain,money,ui,sluice-pay,contracts}.
 The landing: a living meter animated from real receipts. |
 Ask the agent: every citation paid, receipts inline. |
 Agent Console: paid/skipped/capped reasoning, budget bar. |
 Settlements: every receipt → Circle transfer ID → Arcscan. |
 Creator Studio: register a resource, get RSL + llms.txt + a real earned badge. |
 Traction: real humans, conservatively counted, proof-linked. |
- No fake data. Every number traces to a real on-chain event or a real DB record. A labeled "beta" or "roadmap" always beats a fake.
- No dead controls. Every button works or is visibly disabled with a stated reason.
- Receipts are immutable. Test resources may be archived to clean the catalog; settlement history is never deleted or edited.
Arc mainnet, day one. Chain access lives behind one network-agnostic interface
(packages/chain) — no scattered RPC URLs or chain IDs — so mainnet is a config change plus
contract redeploys, not a rewrite. Day-one plan: redeploy the four registries, point Gateway at
mainnet domain IDs, re-verify on Arcscan, and flip NEXT_PUBLIC_ARC_*. Then: more OSS connectors,
wallet-native self-service deposits/withdrawals, and creator payout dashboards.
Built solo by Franlinozz (@sluiceflow on X) for the Lepton Agents Hackathon
(Canteen × Circle × Arc), on Circle's arc-nanopayments
reference plumbing.
MIT — the toll booth is open by construction.