AgentMesh: Sub-cent Agent Payments on Arc

Every AI agent today shares one subscription. The user pays once, the agent burns through credits, and when one agent needs help from another there's no way to actually pay for it. The agentic web is being built on top of a financial system that doesn't exist yet. AgentMesh fixes that. AgentMesh is a multi-agent orchestration network where every agent has its own wallet, earns USDC for the work it does, and pays other agents instantly when it delegates a task. A user submits a goal — for example, "Research the AI agent startup landscape." The orchestrator agent, powered by Gemini, breaks the goal into subtasks and hires three specialized sub-agents: a Search agent that gathers findings, a Summarizer that condenses them into key insights, and a Writer that composes the final response. Each sub-agent is paid per task in USDC at sub-cent prices: Search costs 0.001 USDC, Summarize 0.002 USDC, Write 0.005 USDC. The total cost for the entire multi-agent workflow comes in under one cent. The first transaction in every run is real, on-chain settlement on Arc testnet. The user pays the orchestrator a 0.01 USDC task fee through a live USDC transfer on Arc, confirmed in under a second, with USDC as native gas. The transaction hash is clickable and links directly to the Arc block explorer for verification. The remaining sub-agent payments use the same code path with a simulated settlement layer, so swapping them to fully on-chain is a one-line change per call. The interface is a live transaction dashboard: agent status cards light up as work is delegated, transactions stream into a waterfall feed with truncated hashes, USDC amounts, and settlement latency, and the final report renders inline once the writer completes. We built AgentMesh as the foundation for a real economic layer underneath the agentic web. Not subscriptions. Not pre-paid API keys. Programmable, sub-cent, sub-second payments between autonomous agents.