PayPerByte: Bandwidth Agent for IoT

PayPerByte is a physical demo of how the Agentic Economy can work in the real world. I built a laptop that acts as a Seller Agent, it creates a WiFi hotspot and sells internet per MB to industrial IoT robots using USDC nanopayments on Arc. The idea came because I see IoT and robots as the real future. These devices work offline most of the time collecting sensor data, but every now and then they need to send a bigger report, get an update, or sync with the cloud. Paying for constant WiFi is expensive and overkill. They should only pay for what they actually use. So I made it simple: the robot stays offline, and when it needs to send data, it automatically connects to my hotspot, signs the payment off-chain, pays tiny amounts via Circle, gets temporary access through iptables, uploads what it needs, and disconnects. Right now I have a live dashboard showing off-chain signatures, MB consumed, and the seller’s gateway balance updating. What makes this different from most projects here is that it’s not another web simulation, it’s real hardware controlling real bandwidth for real IoT use cases. I think this is the kind of infrastructure we’re going to need when thousands of autonomous devices start moving around factories, farms, and cities.