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 the only settlement layer built for this.
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 Solution
Why Ergo is the right base layer
The Stack
The agent economy stack
Five layers are live on Ergo today. Two remain open research problems — the most interesting ones for builders to tackle.
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 flows. All live on testnet.
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.
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.