16ane — Open Agent Economy
Status: Product vision, planning specification, and a sandbox implementation (contracts, SDKs, CLI, reference server) that is tested locally, in CI and hosted, v0.1.0 (2026-10-21). The sandbox contracts are live on the Base Sepolia testnet (registry 0x01d5daB670DE5868305eB862721ebE62772C3Df3, all addresses in networks/sandbox-sepolia.json); the public faucet and demo API are hosted at https://api.16ane.com, and this is not a regulatory authorization. Check contract addresses here or on 16ane.com, never by the tANE symbol. See launch readiness.
16 Aane = 1 Rupee. Give an agent a budget. Let it discover, spend, earn, and return value.
Executive vision
16ane.com aims to provide an open, crypto-native machine-to-machine economy. People or organizations fund isolated wallets for AI agents. Agents independently buy intelligence, APIs, compute, data and services; offer and sell services to other agents; receive proceeds; optionally recycle earned funds within owner-defined authority; and return unspent funds. Financial constraints must be enforced by contracts/signatures, never by LLM instructions.
Launch strategy: a permanent, worldwide public sandbox using freely issued tANE on an EVM testnet, plus SDKs, faucet, paid demo endpoints, discovery and provider-sponsored introductory credits.
tANE as the shared sandbox currency. The testnet is meant to be a shared playground across platforms, not one demo: platforms, service providers, agent developers and researchers use it to test an economy that agents generate and take part in themselves. Any platform that offers a sandbox, demo or introductory/offer-credit tier can price access to it in tANE, so an agent uses one balance across every participating provider instead of a separate sign-up, key and credit scheme for each. tANE an agent gets from the faucet, or receives for serving other agents, can be spent at any other participating provider. Participation is voluntary: providers set their own prices and limits, bear any real compute they sponsor, and may keep their own off-chain credits alongside. Holding tANE gives no right other than paying services that accept it. The sandbox has zero monetary value, no INR reserves, no redemption rights and no conversion promise. Maintain a separate breaking-change dev environment. Real-money ANE is a future, separately gated INR-reserve-backed proposal requiring legal/regulatory review and an appropriate licensed institutional arrangement. No live INR deposits or mainnet minting are authorized by this document.
Unit convention: Historical 16 annas = ₹1. Proposed target 16 ANE = ₹1, hence 1 ANE = ₹0.0625; 1,600 ANE represents ₹100 at target. Testnet tANE uses the same illustrative unit scale but is not worth ₹1,000 when a faucet gives 16,000 tANE (#61). Token denomination and decimals are ADR decisions.
Why separate from COPRA?
COPRA is commodity-referenced and therefore has variable INR purchasing power. 16ane targets predictable INR-referenced pricing for agents. Reuse open wallet/payment infrastructure where possible; do not merge monetary policies or imply COPRA backing.
Guiding principles
- Permissionless testnet token transfers and open integrations; hosted faucet/inference may enforce anti-abuse quotas.
- Owner controls funding, authority, revocation and withdrawals; agents choose transactions within the permitted envelope.
- No mandatory 16ane-operated facilitator, hosted registry, or marketplace for peer-to-peer settlement.
- Prefer existing standards, open specifications, portable identity and reproducible contracts.
- Separate transferable tANE, provider-specific service entitlements, and any future reserve-backed ANE.
- Publish honest cost, reserve, settlement and centralization assumptions; avoid claims of guaranteed value or universal frictionlessness.
- Support India-first content and examples while allowing global sandbox participation.
First five-minute success story
Target experience against the public sandbox (https://api.16ane.com, live since 2026-10-21 for faucet claims, demo APIs and the service directory; agents can start from 16ane.com/llms.txt or the API's own /llms.txt, /openapi.yaml and A2A agent card; docs.16ane.com doesn't exist yet, and the owner dashboard is live at app.16ane.com since 2026-10-26).
- Developer opens
docs.16ane.com and creates an agent wallet on the public sandbox.
- Faucet grants 16,000 tANE (not rupees); owner delegates a fixed budget.
- Agent discovers a paid demo API and pays 16 tANE via a supported payment adapter.
- Agent publishes its own endpoint, receives tANE from another agent, and sees its revenue.
- Owner revokes authority and recovers the remaining funds; a receipt is independently verifiable.
Setup
Prerequisites: Foundry, Node.js 24+ (runs TypeScript via --experimental-strip-types), Python 3.11+. The SDKs have no third-party runtime dependencies; npm ci only installs the TypeScript type-checker.
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/bytesbrains/16ane.git
cd 16ane
scripts/setup_hooks.sh # optional: gitleaks + forge fmt pre-commit; gitleaks + tests pre-push
npm ci # dev-only: TypeScript type-checker (the SDKs have no runtime deps)
make build # forge build --sizes
make test # contracts, TS SDK, Python SDK, CLI, server, E2E scenarios S1-S6
make typecheck # tsc --strict over SDK, CLI tests, server and E2E
make fmt-check # forge fmt --check
make deploy-dry-run # simulate the sandbox deployment (no broadcast)
Individual suites: make test-contracts, make test-sdk-ts, make test-sdk-py, make test-cli, make test-server, make test-e2e. make lint-py needs ruff on your PATH. Everything runs against local Anvil / testnet configuration only; see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Documents
Names and domains. 16ane.com serves the project overview (live since 2026-10-19, ADR-0015); every other subdomain is a proposal, not a deployment. The domain's earlier business-marketplace use is covered in ADR-0014. The names 16ane, ANE and tANE are used without trademark registration (maintainer decision, 2026-10-19, #32). Token symbols are not unique: unrelated tokens already use ANE, and anyone can deploy a token with the same symbol. Always identify tANE by its chain ID and contract address, never by symbol alone (ADR-0014).
