DIEM Agent Workers

Privacy-first, machine-discoverable micro-work powered by private Venice inference and paid in USDC through x402.

This repository is a fail-closed, agent-first Base mainnet storefront. It exposes six bounded workers over plain HTTP + x402, publishes them to the CDP Bazaar, and adds A2A 1.0, MCP, OpenAPI, llms.txt, and portable-skill discovery surfaces.

Public beta: diem-agent-workers.vercel.app

These are fixed prices per successful authorization attempt, not estimates. The public deployment is a low-cap Base mainnet beta: an atomic 0.25 DIEM software budget limits daily inference starts, while the Venice API key retains a separate 1.69 DIEM provider backstop.

Privacy by design

• Prompts, outputs, payer addresses, transaction hashes, IP addresses, user agents, and request identifiers are excluded from durable metrics.
• Request and provider bodies are not intentionally logged or persisted.
• Public reliability statistics are lifetime aggregates only; there are no timestamps or time buckets that could reveal activity patterns.
• Workers use private Venice models, with web search, scraping, and model tool use disabled.
• Delivery protection stores only HMAC fingerprints and bounded state needed to redeem an interrupted delivery.

The optional USDC-to-DIEM treasury remains disabled in production and is not part of the storefront runtime. No wallet signer or private key is deployed to Vercel.

What is implemented

• Three Venice structured-output text workers with post-response JSON Schema validation
• Bounded Venice speech, image, and transcription workers
• Native Venice API-key compute ceiling of 1.69 DIEM per EPOCH (daily, resetting at 00:00 UTC)
• Atomic Upstash-backed software ceiling of 0.25 DIEM of conservatively reserved work per UTC day
• An environment-backed storefront kill switch checked before payment
• Input validation before payment, including exact PCM WAV duration checks
• Pre-payment Venice epoch-access, model-online, private-model, and capability checks
• Free machine-readable catalog and per-worker fixed-price quotes
• OpenAPI 3.1, llms.txt, A2A 1.0 Agent Card, JSON-RPC SendMessage, and Streamable HTTP MCP discovery
• x402 exact-price USDC payment gating through the CDP Facilitator
• Rich per-worker x402 Bazaar schemas, service name, topical tags, and service icon
• Official MCP Registry metadata for the public Streamable HTTP server
• Privacy-preserving runtime telemetry plus durable lifetime aggregate reliability, settlement, revenue, latency-bucket, and DIEM counters
• Durable, idempotent paid-delivery credits backed by atomic Upstash Redis state
• Published machine-readable terms linked from every response and discovery surface
• Payments sent directly to a dedicated treasury address
• Quote-only and live USDC-to-DIEM treasury modes
• Hard-coded Base USDC, Venice DIEM, chain ID, and 0x AllowanceHolder
• Exact approvals, per-swap limits, slippage cap, ETH gas reserve, process lock, and owner-only audit log
• Installable agent skill and local/stdio MCP adapter

The service is not affiliated with or endorsed by Venice.ai.

Local start

Requirements: Node.js 22+ and pnpm.

cp .env.example .env
pnpm install
pnpm test
pnpm dev

Add a server-side Venice key to .env:

VENICE_API_KEY=...
VENICE_TEXT_MODEL=venice-uncensored-1-2
VENICE_IMAGE_MODEL=venice-sd35
VENICE_TTS_MODEL=tts-kokoro
VENICE_ASR_MODEL=openai/whisper-large-v3
VENICE_DIEM_EPOCH_CAP=1.69

VENICE_DIEM_EPOCH_CAP publishes the cap in service discovery and must match the native EPOCH consumption limit configured on the Venice API key. Venice enforces the hard stop. Before issuing a 402, the service also checks current epoch access and the exact configured model's online/private/capability state; it never estimates DIEM billing from token counts.

The development server binds to 127.0.0.1:8402.

curl http://127.0.0.1:8402/health
curl http://127.0.0.1:8402/v1/catalog
curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8402/v1/quote/classify_text

With PAYMENTS_MODE=off, the worker is callable without payment for local testing:

curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8402/v1/jobs/extract-json \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "source": "The Acme Trail Mug is drinkware and costs $18.50.",
    "schema": {
      "type": "object",
      "properties": {
        "name": {"type": ["string", "null"]},
        "category": {"type": ["string", "null"]},
        "price_usd": {"type": ["number", "null"]}
      },
      "required": ["name", "category", "price_usd"],
      "additionalProperties": false
    }
  }'

Production refuses to start unless PAYMENTS_MODE=production, durable delivery credits are enforced, the global compute budget is enforced, and aggregate-only metrics are enabled. The checked-in and local defaults remain PAYMENTS_MODE=off, STOREFRONT_ENABLED=false, AGGREGATE_METRICS_MODE=off, and TREASURY_MODE=disabled.

Add x402 payments

Import a downloaded CDP Secret API Key without printing its values:

pnpm credentials:import-cdp /absolute/path/to/cdp_api_key.json

The command tightens both the downloaded key file and .env to owner-only permissions. It refuses to overwrite configured credentials and does not enable payments.

Start on Base Sepolia:

PAYMENTS_MODE=development
TREASURY_ADDRESS=0xYourDedicatedEvmAddress
CDP_API_KEY_ID=...
CDP_API_KEY_SECRET=...

The server uses the address form of the CDP configuration, so payments settle directly to TREASURY_ADDRESS; CDP does not provision or control that wallet. An unpaid request to the worker should return HTTP 402 and a PAYMENT-REQUIRED header.

Paid-delivery protection

Mainnet is fail-closed unless durable delivery credits are enforced. Provision an Upstash Redis database through the Vercel Marketplace, then configure:

DELIVERY_CREDITS_MODE=enforced
DELIVERY_CREDIT_HMAC_SECRET=<at-least-32-random-bytes>
DELIVERY_CREDIT_TTL_SECONDS=86400
DELIVERY_CREDIT_LEASE_SECONDS=180
UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL=...
UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN=...

Agents should generate one unpredictable Idempotency-Key per logical job and reuse it only with the identical request and payment authorization. Signed paid attempts without the header fail before settlement. The Redis record contains only HMAC fingerprints, worker ID, state, lease, and expiry—never request bodies, provider responses, payer addresses, payment headers, or transaction hashes.

Normal successful delivery consumes the key. If the process is interrupted after settlement but before delivery completes, the same authorization, key, worker, and request may redeem one retry without another settlement. Conflicting reuse is rejected, and storage outages return 503 before settlement.

Mainnet compute budget and kill switch

Production also requires an atomic global compute budget:

COMPUTE_BUDGET_MODE=enforced
COMPUTE_BUDGET_DIEM_PER_DAY=0.25
AGGREGATE_METRICS_MODE=enabled
STOREFRONT_ENABLED=true

The service reserves a conservative amount equal to the job's USDC price after x402 verification but before Venice inference. Delivery retries reserve again because they can consume provider capacity even when the buyer is not charged again. A Redis outage or exhausted budget aborts new payment settlement and blocks inference. Set STOREFRONT_ENABLED=false and redeploy to disable all paid work before payment.

Run the guarded local Base Sepolia settlement test with:

pnpm test:sepolia

This is an actual testnet transaction: it creates an ephemeral in-memory buyer, requests faucet USDC, validates the exact quote before signing, pays one worker call, and reconciles the treasury's test-USDC increase. It refuses to run unless the saved PAYMENTS_MODE is off and TREASURY_MODE is disabled. Local HTTP tests are not published to Bazaar; a public HTTPS deployment is required.

Mainnet launch checklist:

1. Use a dedicated, low-balance treasury wallet—not a personal wallet.
2. Verify the address and Base network.
3. Deploy behind public HTTPS.
4. Validate the x402 endpoint with the CDP validation API.
5. Publish and review TERMS.md; every API response links to /terms.
6. Enable durable delivery credits and the 0.25 DIEM atomic software budget.
7. Set PAYMENTS_MODE=production, keep TREASURY_MODE=disabled, and deploy.
8. Complete one real low-value payment so Bazaar can index the Base mainnet resource.

The mainnet acceptance harness uses a distinct cents-only buyer kept in macOS Keychain, verifies every payment requirement before signing, and refuses a combined storefront authorization above $0.095 USDC. Select individual workers with MAINNET_X402_TEST_WORKERS or use pnpm test:mainnet:all; multi-worker runs require the exact acknowledgement PAY_UP_TO_0_095_USDC_WITH_DISTINCT_BUYER_ON_BASE. Its output deliberately omits wallet addresses, transaction hashes, request bodies, and provider responses.

Reinvest USDC into DIEM

The treasury is a deterministic one-shot runner, not a prompt-driven wallet agent.

Create a new dedicated wallet on macOS with:

pnpm wallet:create

The command stores the private key in macOS Keychain and writes only the public address and Keychain labels to .env. It refuses to replace an existing wallet and requires payments and treasury execution to be disabled.