Sluice

Make the smallest unit sellable.

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

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The 60-second story

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.

What's real right now

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

Deployed contracts (Arc testnet, chain 5042002, verified on Arcscan)

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

How Sluice maps to the judging criteria

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.

Architecture

The Meter — the primitive x402 is missing

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.

Quickstart

Use the hosted app (3 minutes)

1. Open sluiceflow.vercel.app and hit Open app — the first-run checklist walks you through connect → funds → first paid action.
2. Or skip the wallet entirely: ask the research agent a question and watch it pay each source it cites, receipt by receipt.
3. Verify anything you see in the Settlements explorer or on Arcscan.

Run it locally

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/web

Monorepo: 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}.

Screenshots

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.

The honesty contract

• 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.

Roadmap

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.

Team

Built solo by Franlinozz (@sluiceflow on X) for the Lepton Agents Hackathon (Canteen × Circle × Arc), on Circle's arc-nanopayments reference plumbing.

License

MIT — the toll booth is open by construction.