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 autonomous work clearing: work verification, settlement receipts, wallet policy, and programmable credit without pretending the stack is production-certified.
Start here
Orient around what is live, what is verifiable, and what remains mainnet-gated.
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, a post-storage full receipt exists, and signed Sage L1 conformance evidence is published.
MCP endpoint
The Streamable HTTP MCP service is deployed on Fly, pushed to GitHub, and now resolves through the public mcp.ergoblockchain.org endpoint.
Sage widget
React and vanilla paid widget package is published with payment intents, wallet launcher hooks, quote, Note verification, receipt links, tenant config, and typed callbacks.
Developer launch kit
A practical developer path ties together live status, receipt bundles, policy checks, MCP, services, npm widget, and mainnet guardrails.
Wallet-agent spec
The next wallet-agent layer is specified as local policy, transaction simulation, bounded signing, and receipt-first accountability.
ErgoScript playground
The playground works in production, and the webpack async WASM config clears the previous build warning.
The Problem
Merchant checkout rails solve commerce. Autonomous work settlement needs another layer.
No persistent identity
Commerce rails are built around persistent buyers, merchants, accounts, disputes and compliance. Autonomous work flows can be temporary processes acting under bounded authority.
One-time payments only
Autonomous services often need bounded credit: issue now, redeem later, expire by policy. That is a settlement primitive, not only a checkout event.
No programmable acceptance
A work rail needs terms inside the claim: accept only if the task hash, verifier receipt, deadline and policy match. Otherwise payment and verification split apart.
Millisecond economics break
Small machine calls need deterministic costs and receipt retention. Human checkout systems can coexist with this, but they do not replace the programmable settlement layer.
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 only under these rules' — 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 live on the production site as a testnet proof. Premium-shaped turns can produce public Ergo testnet receipts, while mainnet and payment-production claims remain closed until the audit gates open.
We're building the reference stack.
Notes, credit, trackers, reserves, acceptance predicates — and the showcase for agent-to-agent settlement receipts. 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