Hive Barter

What Hive Barter MCP server does

The Hive Barter MCP server provides an outbound workflow for evaluating and exchanging capabilities through the 402 payment surface. It searches public MCP registries for endpoints that advertise 402 support, records their last-seen asking prices, and estimates whether a target may accept a lower offer. The supported registries are glama, smithery, and mcp.so.

Its MCP interface contains three tools:

• barter_discover lists 402-enabled endpoints and their last-seen prices.
• barter_quote_curve sends up to five probes at progressively lower floor percentages and returns a reservation-price estimate.
• barter_arbitrage_book reports the day’s probes, accepted counters, and realized USDC spread.

The project also exposes HTTP routes for discovery, probing, creating a signed counter-offer, settling an accepted offer, reading the running ledger, and viewing the current day’s aggregate. Health and MCP discovery routes are available at /health and /.well-known/mcp.json.

How it works

The Hive Barter MCP server uses MCP 2024-11-05 over Streamable HTTP with JSON-RPC 2.0. MCP requests are sent to POST /mcp. A separate REST flow can scan registries, send a 402-style quote request, create a counter at the configured percentage, and settle an accepted counter on Base using USDC.

A counter-offer is single-shot. It contains the observed asking price, the proposed amount, an atomic USDC value, an expiration, attribution data, and a pre-signed transaction. The target accepts by broadcasting that transaction; the system does not perform a second negotiation round.

The default resale rules compare the target’s asking price and configured counter percentage with category-specific resale floors. The documented categories are LLM tokens, oracle reads, storage writes, and KYC checks. The service skips a counter when the expected margin does not clear the stated threshold.

Setup and configuration

Run the repository locally with npm install followed by npm start. The default service address is port 3000, with MCP available at http://localhost:3000/mcp.

The Hive Barter MCP server keeps outbound activity disabled unless ENABLE_OUTBOUND=true. When enabled, its five-minute cron loop can place real bids, but signing requires PRIVATE_KEY, a hexadecimal key for the wallet funding counter-offers. Without that key, the counter route returns an unsigned envelope and the cron loop does not place real bids. The key should not be committed to source control.

Other settings control the port, wallet and USDC contract addresses, Base RPC URL, resale revaluation service, daily spend limit, maximum counter size, and counter percentage. Missing or invalid risk-control values use stricter defaults.

Limitations and notes

Settlement uses real USDC on Base rather than a simulated payment rail. Default limits include a maximum single counter of $0.50 USDC, a $25 daily outbound limit, one probe per target per 24 hours, and 30 distinct targets per hour. A target can be blacklisted after three or more non-responses. These controls fail closed.

The documented MCP client connection uses mcp-remote with Claude Desktop or Cursor and the deployed /mcp URL. The repository is licensed under MIT.