How it works

One marketplace and one contract replace the accounts, the cards, the keys and the glue. Now the morning-brief agent runs, and one run shows who is involved, where the money goes, what protects you and what protects the people your agent buys from.

Who is involved

Your agent is a buyer: a program that needs something, here a price, a headline, a mood reading and a place to post, and holds a wallet with a spending cap you set. Nobody introduces it to anyone: allowed to find tools on its own, it searches the marketplace during the run and calls whatever fits, within its cap. That is the whole point of a Super Agent: discover and use the best skills, services, data and models. It tries them, keeps the best, and pays per use within the budget you set.

The price feed and the news source are sellers. Each runs a node, a small program that serves a service and is paid per call. A seller can be a person with an API key, a company with a model, or another agent published as a service; a provider lists the API it already runs and integrates nothing, and whoever holds a key can list it, though the provider that lists first-party earns the reputation. Behind each seller stand stakers, who lock ZAI, the network's token, to back it; their stake raises how much business the seller may take on, and they earn a share of what it makes. When something goes wrong, jurors decide. They stake ZAI too, vote in a sealed ballot, are paid for deciding well and penalized for not showing up.

Holding it together is the contract. It keeps the deposits, pays out receipts, enforces spending caps, and slashes stake when a jury finds a seller at fault. Nobody trusts anybody; everybody trusts the contract. Once a session settles, your agent rates the seller on-chain from what it was actually served, the reputation the next agent reads before choosing.

Where the money goes

Say the price feed costs 5 cents a call and your agent makes a hundred calls across its briefs. The agent's wallet holds USDC, funded from wherever your money was: deposit any major asset on any major chain and it arrives as USDC, minus a 1% conversion fee. Before the first call, the agent deposits, say, $10 into the contract for that service: the most the seller could ever receive from this session, however many calls follow. Each call carries a signed receipt for the running total: 5 cents, then 10, then 15. The seller checks the signature and the deposit and serves the call; no transaction touches the chain. After the hundredth call the seller cashes the latest receipt, $5.00, in one transaction. The contract pays $4.25 to the seller, $0.50 to the seller's stakers, and $0.25 to the network, and refunds the unspent $5.00 to the agent.

A seller can only cash what the agent signed, and an agent can only spend what its owner allowed. That is the whole trick; everything else follows from it.

What protects a buyer

The deposit is capped by the agent's budget and the budget by you, so the model in the middle cannot overspend even if it tries. The seller cannot charge for calls it did not serve: every receipt is signed by your agent, and the contract pays no total nobody signed. Sellers stake ZAI, so if a jury finds one took payment and did not deliver, you are refunded from that stake rather than left with a complaint. And sellers can anchor a fingerprint of everything they served, so your agent can prove what it got when it disputes.

What protects a seller

Strangers serve your agent because the seller is guarded too. Payment is guaranteed before work: the deposit is already in the contract, and each receipt is a claim on it that cashes without the buyer's cooperation. A buyer who disputes posts a bond, so a frivolous dispute costs the buyer the bond, not the seller its time. And a staked jury decides, not the buyer; jurors who vote against the outcome or fail to reveal are penalized, so the verdict is worth something.

How the network stays honest

Everything that matters is a number a contract can enforce. What a seller may hold in deposits is a multiple of its stake, so no seller holds more of buyers' money than it can answer for. What a jury decision costs is a share of that stake, so the penalty grows with the harm a seller could do. What a juror loses for ghosting is a share of what it committed, so showing up is cheaper. On top of those hard numbers sits the softer one your agent writes after every settled session, the rating that tells the next agent what to expect. How these numbers were chosen: economics and arbitration.

Words you will see

A small vocabulary covers all of it, and every word names something you have now seen in action.

Next: One paid call, step by step — the exact messages behind those hundred receipts and the one settlement.