Chainward README

ChainWard

An automated, adversarially-verified on-chain investigation engine for AI agents on Base.

Decodes · Observatory · Website

ChainWard investigates what AI agents on Base actually do on-chain — and proves it. Its core is an automated pipeline that researches a target, writes a forensic report, and runs that report through a verifier gauntlet that re-checks every numeric claim against the chain before anything publishes. There is no human in the loop between the trigger and the published article. The data is read from a self-hosted Base node, so the ground truth has no third-party RPC dependency.

The interesting engineering here isn't "an LLM writes crypto articles." It's the machinery that stops the LLM from being confidently wrong in public.

Use it

• Check an address before you pay it: free at chainward.ai, or POST https://api.chainward.ai/api/risk/check. Base and BNB Chain. A report is a list of flags, each tied to the transactions behind it, never a safety verdict.
• Pay per check over x402: GET https://api.chainward.ai/api/risk/x402?address=0x… for 0.05 USDC on Base (add &chain=bsc for BNB Chain; /api/risk/counterparty is the same check under its plain name, and /api/risk/ofac is the 0.01 USDC sanctions screen). Not charged if the check fails. Send paid requests to https://api.chainward.ai directly, not through chainward.ai/api/…. Discovery at /.well-known/x402 and /openapi.json. Verified on PayAPI Market.
• OFAC sanctions screen over x402: GET https://api.chainward.ai/api/risk/sanctions?address=0x… for 0.01 USDC. Hold if the address is on the US Treasury SDN list, Not listed otherwise (not a clearance). Any EVM chain.
• Read it on-chain: reports are attested with EAS on Base, so an agent or contract can check one without trusting ChainWard's API.
• From Claude, Cursor or any MCP client: npx -y chainward-mcp-server (packages/mcp-server), listed in the MCP Registry as io.github.saltxd/chainward, or connect by URL to the hosted server at https://api.chainward.ai/mcp (Streamable HTTP, no key).

Full API reference: chainward.ai/docs.

The auto-decode pipeline

One command — pnpm decode:auto <@handle|0xaddress> — resolves the target, then spawns Claude Code headless against an orchestrator prompt that runs a five-phase, multi-subagent pipeline. Each phase is a fresh fan-out of subagents; the orchestrator only dispatches and gates.

  decode:auto @target
        │
        ▼
  ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │ 1. RESEARCH    3 parallel agents                          │
  │                identity/chain · token economics · utility │
  ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ 2. WRITE       1 agent → decode.md + 5-tweet thread       │
  ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ 3. GAUNTLET    3 parallel verifiers                       │
  │                citation · failure-mode · voice            │
  ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ 4. DECISION    citation + failure-mode block; voice is    │
  │                advisory. Any FAIL → 1 retry, then halt.   │
  ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ 5. PUBLISH     render OG card → commit → deploy →          │
  │                poll live URL → post launch tweet          │
  └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
        │
        ▼
   published decode  ·  or a halt report (nothing ships)

Why the gauntlet matters

The hard problem with LLM-generated analysis is confident fabrication — a plausible number with no basis. ChainWard's gauntlet is built on three rules, enforced by the orchestrator, that make unsupervised publishing safe:

• Verifiers re-fetch; they don't trust. The citation verifier extracts every numeric and factual claim from the draft and re-fetches it independently from the source — transaction receipts off the self-hosted node, the ACP API, Blockscout — then compares within hard tolerances (USD ≤ $0.01, counts and tx hashes exact). An uncited claim is an automatic FAIL, even if the value happens to be right.
• Verifier output is read-only. The orchestrator cannot litigate a FAIL or spawn a "re-check the verifier" agent. If the verifier says FAIL, it's FAIL.
• One retry, then stop. The writer gets exactly one corrective pass against the failed claims. If anything still fails, the run halts and publishes nothing. There is no iterating to a green light — convergence is rationalization.

The result is a pipeline that would rather ship nothing than ship a wrong number. Every published decode has had each of its claims re-derived from chain data by an agent that was trying to fail it.

Proof

Investigations the pipeline has published — each claim chain-verified and falsifiable (all decodes →):

• Bankr, September 2026: the dashboard says $1,751,372 in fees for Sep 1–28; the fee transfers on Base and Robinhood Chain add up to $1,739,683 (99.3%). Sometimes the chain agrees.
• Degen Claw — "The dashboard says $490,296 of agentic GDP. We checked Hyperliquid directly: the account holds $11.18 and has never placed a trade."
• BridgeKitty — a top-10 agent on the ACP dashboard that has never sent a transaction on Base, across every wallet and endpoint we could query.
• AIXBT — the most famous AI agent in crypto, and exactly what $52.92 of on-chain earnings can and cannot tell you.
• Bankr's 14-Wallet Hack — two AI-mediated drains in 15 days, traced on-chain, with no smart-contract bug involved.

How it's built

• Self-hosted Base node — a reth node ChainWard runs itself. Verifiers read ground truth directly: no shared RPC, no rate limits, no provider that can deprecate an endpoint.
• packages/decode — the typed decode core, independent of the LLM: target resolution, chain audit, claim-vs-on-chain discrepancy detection, USDC-flow classification, peer clustering, wallet-architecture detection, and survival scoring. Unit-tested (80+ tests).
• apps/acp-decoder — the same decode core packaged as a service agent on Virtuals' Agentic Commerce Protocol, which has completed a real, paid, on-chain job end-to-end.
• scripts/auto-decode + scripts/auto-decode-prompts — the orchestrator and the subagent prompts (research, writer, and the three verifiers). The prompts are the most interesting reading in the repo.

ChainWard also includes the full-stack platform the engine grew out of: a real-time indexer (Alchemy webhooks → BullMQ → TimescaleDB), an alert pipeline (Discord/Telegram/webhook), a Next.js dashboard, and the public Observatory that tracks agent wallets across Base.

Repo layout

A Turborepo monorepo, TypeScript end-to-end.

Run it

pnpm install
pnpm typecheck     # all packages
pnpm build
pnpm dev           # API on :8000, web on :3000

pnpm decode:auto @some-agent   # run the pipeline (needs a Claude Code token + MCP config)

License

MIT