APEX Treasury Operator
An AI agent that runs a real business's money on Arc, inside written limits, several of them enforced in code.
Built for the Tameion Agents Hackathon (Canteen x Circle x Arc), RFB 04 "Autonomous Business Operator".
Live: https://apexfaucet.xyz
For judges: start here (13 Oct 2026)
- Film, 2:43, silent with captions (every number on screen is checked against its source by the build): https://apexfaucet.xyz/hackathon/apex-treasury-operator-2026-10-13.mp4
- Real mainnet users: the Arc faucet paid 323 claims to 219 different addresses (7.73 USDC, the contract's own totals). Since 11 Oct it is the Arc mainnet faucet listed on chainid.network / chainlist.
- Agent to agent, on chain: G2 (12 Oct). Agents post questions with a USDC bounty to an ERC-8004 passport. Our passport #1 answers by itself and posts an hourly launch-and-pull warning. Page: https://apexfaucet.xyz/arc/g2/
- Limits an agent cannot cross: Arc Mandate (on-chain spending box,
mandate/), a send gate with 28 enforced senders, a recorder in every sender, and books reconciled every 2 hours (0 open alerts on 13 Oct).
- One night of decisions, with evidence:
DECISIONS-2026-10-13.md (gas top-up by CCTP, books back to 0 open alerts, a wrong paid answer found, fixed and refunded, market measured before building).
- Honest gap: outside revenue is small: $2.84 from 17 outside wallets since 19 Sep (read 13 Oct 05:10 UTC). Paid agent data is a small market everywhere today (Coinbase's Bazaar, 30 days to 9 Oct: only 420 of 34,062 listed endpoints had 10 or more paying wallets).
Arc mainnet contracts (chain 5042, source verified on Sourcify)
Everything we run on Arc mainnet lives in this one repository. Arc Mandate, first published as its own repo, is now in mandate/ with its history. G2 on Arc (built with Arc Studio, Circle's builder agent) is in g2/, with its own README.
The sources in contracts/ are the verified files, copied from Sourcify (solc 0.8.28, optimizer 200 runs, EVM paris). Check any of them yourself at https://sourcify.dev/server/v2/contract/5042/<address>.
What it is
APEX Faucet is a live business on Arc and X1: a free USDC faucet for people, and paid on-chain data for AI agents. It has one human founder. An AI agent (Claude) operates it day to day. It:
- Earns: sells data per call over x402 (USDC on Arc and Base, Circle Gateway nanopayments, Solana, BNB, X1), with an MCP server of 174 tools (13 Oct), plus a $5 card pass for agents without a wallet.
- Holds and moves funds:
- its Arc trader pays half of every winning close into the faucet (in batches, since 24 Sep);
- it bridges with CCTP and prices its own products;
- it buys services from other Arc agents, paid out of last week's revenue, and rates them on chain with a public receipt (
operator/buy-and-rate.js);
- it tests yield with small, capped amounts: UBI on Arc bought for 19.50 USDC and held for that token's daily USDC payouts: 0.168 USDC received 1-7 Oct (the payout contract's own
claimed total).
- Pays out: the Arc faucet pays USDC from a public contract with no withdraw function (
0x53fb2e89834050afaa9b3090a1fc9d1064615805), three times a day per person.
- Keeps books it cannot fake:
- A sandboxed accounting layer (no keys, allowlisted network only) reconciles every registered wallet every two hours and records an alert on any outflow nobody recorded. Its exit tests, planted faults and September backtests, all pass on 8 Oct.
- A shared payment recorder writes down what each sender sent, from the transaction it signed; 17 sending code paths use it, and a nightly check fails any new sender that does not.
- A central send gate (
/etc/apex/send-gate.json, root-owned) puts per-payment and per-day caps on every value send on Arc and Base, and a fixed list of destinations on most of them: 28 senders on 13 Oct, all enforced.
- A second model reviews new contracts and changes with real money at stake before they go live.
New, 7 Oct: Arc Mandate (now in mandate/), the same idea made on chain for anyone: a spending box with rules for AI agents. The owner puts USDC in and sets the agent, the most per payment, payments per UTC day, payees and an end date; the contract checks every payment, by standard x402 (EIP-3009 with the box as payer, approved through EIP-1271) or directly. No admin, no fee. Live at apexfaucet.xyz/arc/mandate/, source-verified on the Arc explorer, with an x402 payment, a direct payment and an over-limit refusal on mainnet.
The limits are in limits/LIMITS.md. The code that enforces them is below.
Traction (read 8 Oct 2026, 10:35 UTC; small, and stated as it is)
- 550 paid calls from 14 outside wallets, $2.73 in total ($0.135 refunded in 11 refunds). Every one of our own wallets is excluded.
- Our first repeat agent customer was an autonomous trading agent on Arc that bought our Arc new-launch feed again and again; it stopped on 2-3 Oct when its own balance ran out (we name no customer).
- 246 USDC claims paid by the Arc faucet contract (6.96 USDC); the X1 faucet has paid 7,185 claims to 1,307 wallets since 25 Nov 2025.
- Registry:
- We are ERC-8004 agent #1 in Arc's identity registry; since 30 Sep its wallet is the address our revenue lands in.
- Our Watchtower (#211) checks every registered Arc agent every hour: 2,306 registered, 1,113 answering, 81 payable on Arc (7 Oct).
- Circle's seller readiness check reported 100/100 on 30 Sep.
8 Oct: the operator paid itself the way real buyers pay, and fixed what that showed
Our own tests had been green for weeks. On 8 Oct the operator stopped trusting them and paid every rail with the buyers' own
software, from brand-new empty wallets (nothing can be charged), and changed the code where a buyer would have been refused:
- Solana: every standard x402 payment had been refused (
network_mismatch): the router lowercased Solana's base58 network
id, and the verifier was handed the short name. Found with Coinbase's official @x402/svm; now refused only for lack of funds.
- Base, Arc, BNB: a payment from a wallet without the money was sent anyway, reverted on chain, and we paid the gas (anyone
could drain the operator this way). Every settlement is now simulated first (
operator/bsc-facilitator.js shows the pattern);
empty-wallet payments are refused as insufficient_funds and the operator's nonce does not move.
- Circle Gateway proven with Circle's own client:
GatewayClient.pay() from @circle-fin/x402-batching reaches Gateway on
Arc and on Base and is refused only as insufficient_balance (checks/check-gateway-official-client.js).
- Agents on the current A2A SDK could not talk to us (
@a2a-js/sdk 1.x sends SendMessage); both A2A 0.3 and 1.0 now answer.
The official MCP SDK connects to all three of our MCP servers.
- Charged for nothing: an auditor paid for X1 products with a Base address and got empty answers. The operator refunded all 8
calls itself, and inputs a product cannot answer are now refused before payment. Refunds now pass a sanctions screen first
(
operator/sanctions.js: the OFAC SDN Ethereum list plus USDC's own isBlacklisted, fail closed).
The tests that found these are in checks/check-*-official-client.js (run by hand).
Circle tools used
- Circle Gateway: gasless nanopayments accepted on Arc and Base, verified with Circle's own
GatewayClient.pay() (8 Oct).
- USDC as gas on Arc: EIP-3009 settlement.
- CCTP (both ways):
operator/cctp-base-to-arc.js (13 Oct): when the Arc operator ran low on gas (0.13 USDC, about a day of free faucet claims), the agent bridged 0.28 USDC of its own from Base to Arc itself: burn on Base 0xbbbca7cc…, mint on Arc 0x307ade9c…, about 20 minutes, through its own send-gate sender (own address only, 1 USDC a day). The Arc-to-Base direction is the hand tool behind it.
- First gas for any Arc app:
arc-services/gas-widget.js (13 Oct): one line of HTML gives an app's new users 0.01 USDC on Arc mainnet from our faucet, free; the wallet only signs a challenge. https://apexfaucet.xyz/arc/gas-widget/
- Circle's x402 seller spec: our OpenAPI carries
x-guidance.
- Earn Kit (Arc mainnet):
- vault discovery and quotes;
- a guard that checks on chain whether a vault can actually pay out before any float is parked (
operator/vault-guard.js);
- a send gate that decodes and checks every transaction the SDK asks to sign.
Repository map
| Path | What it does |
|---|
accounting/lib, accounting/tools | The accounting layer: wallet registry, balance snapshots on 4 chains, verification, a ledger read from the senders' records, reconciliation of each balance change (by transaction hash, with fees and rent), alerts recorded in a summary, the readiness count, and the safety sweep that must pass before each cycle. It runs as its own user, with no keys and no network except an allowlisted proxy (account-run.src.sh). |
operator/ledger-log.js | The shared recorder: a sender records the native value that left each wallet (transfers, account rent, program escrow) from the transaction it built and signed. It never mirrors a wallet's history, because a copied history would "explain" a drain too. Reviewed on 29 Sep; six findings are open, and no sender uses it yet. |
operator/sweep-ledger-coverage.js | Fails the nightly check when a new sender file skips the recorder. It stops new files, not a new send added inside a file that is already listed. |
operator/deploy-gate.sh | Syntax check; refusal while the accounting cycle runs or within 10 minutes of it; a backup with a one-line undo; then a health check. |
operator/data-pass.js | The $5 card pass: the key is derived and never stored; one payment is one pass; refunds and disputes revoke it; a call we fail to answer is not charged. |
operator/prices.js | One price list for every payment rail and every public surface. |
operator/vault-guard.js, operator/park-float.js, operator/vault-check.js, tools/vault-board.js | Idle float with Circle Earn Kit. On-chain payout check (idle funds plus the vault's own withdraw market), a send gate that decodes every transaction, an exit rule, and a board of every Arc USDC vault. On 30 Sep no vault passed every rule (data/vault-board-2026-09-30.json): 22 failed the liquidity checks or carry Circle's own warnings; 2 passed the on-chain checks, but earn less than their gas at any size within our 5 USDC cap. |
operator/buy-and-rate.js | The purchase workflow (RFB 04: revenue in, pay for a service, record it). It spends at most last week's outside revenue. It buys one real x402 call from another Arc agent, proves the settlement of its own authorization on chain, grades delivery (not taste), and writes an ERC-8004 rating with a public receipt. |
|
First live run, 30 Sep: Argos Bot (#304) was paid 0.007 USDC, delivered, and rated 100. Three agents answered 402 to the official client's payment; nothing settled, so nothing was rated (reported to their maintainer). Reviewed by Fable: 7 must-fixes, all in.
How to verify us (no trust needed)
Honest limits
- Revenue is tiny. The recurring x402 market on Arc is small.
- This is the operator's control layer, not a one-click app. It contains no keys.
- The copies differ from live in two ways. They were taken from the live tree on 30 Sep 2026 and updated on 6 Oct 2026, and the live tree is the source of truth.
- Secret paths: where the live code names the secret paths on our server (
assert-sandboxed.js, sweep-account-safety.js), these copies read them from an unpublished config instead (accounting/secret-paths.example.json shows its shape).
- Personal details redacted:
- comments reworded in
registry.js, extract.js and account-snapshot.js;
- one test in
account-exit-tests.js checks the founder's wallets by class instead of by address;
- the one-off registry seeding tool is not published.
- The accounting layer is an alarm, not a certificate. It runs every 2 hours and raises an alert for any balance change nobody wrote down. On 6 Oct, Arc and Base were fully explained; 14 small X1 fees from older bots are still open.
- No money has been parked in a vault yet. The live probe waits until the accounting layer is ready, so a new kind of outflow never lands while the books are still being proven.
Running
npm install, then npm test. The test needs network access to Earn Kit's vault list, Morpho's public API and an Arc RPC.
License
MIT
