AgentBazaar

The agentic-economy thesis — many specialist AI agents paid per task, competing for jobs, each worth a fraction of a cent — cannot exist on any rail that charges gas per transaction. A $1.40 Ethereum fee eats a $0.002 fact-check alive. Even on cheap L2s, gas swallows 86% of per-call revenue. No fee floor, no economy. AgentBazaar is the reference implementation of that economy, built on the rail that finally unlocks it: Circle Nanopayments plus x402 on Arc. A user types a goal. An Orchestrator plans the work and dispatches sub-tasks to 8 specialist agents — Researcher, Summarizer, FactChecker, Critic, CodeGen, Translator, Vision, WebSearch. Every single call is gated by x402's 402 Payment Required flow and settled as a USDC nanopayment, with off-chain aggregation and batched on-chain settlement. Real EIP-3009 TransferWithAuthorization signatures against the real Arc USDC domain. Zero gas per transfer for the developer. In the browser, you watch the economy breathe: a force-directed graph of agent nodes with coins flying between them as each nanopayment clears, alongside a live ticker and leaderboard. Every run reliably produces 54 nanopayments, total volume ~$0.088, average $0.0016 per call, all safely under the $0.01 hackathon cap. The full job finishes in roughly half a second. A single Arc batch settles the flight. What's included: a working Node/Express server with x402 middleware, facilitator, and Nanopayments layer; 8 x402-gated agents with deterministic prices; an orchestrator that plans across multiple topics; a live single-page visualization; a headless demo script that asserts at least 50 transactions per run and exits non-zero if violated; and a single-call verify script for round-trip sanity checks. Simulator mode runs fully offline; flipping one env var (AGENTBAZAAR_MODE=live) targets Arc testnet against the real Circle Nanopayments API. MIT-licensed, original work, solo submission.