Pico — Frictionless micropayments for creators & agents
Live: pico-payment-casper.vercel.app · Follow: @picocspr · Buildathon: Casper Agentic Buildathon 2026 — Final Round qualifier · Program: Casper Forward Cohort 1 🏁
The idea
Creators and publishers lose their audience at the checkout page:
nobody enters card details to read one article or unlock one PDF worth
$0.25. Subscriptions over-ask, ads under-pay, and AI agents — the
fastest-growing consumers of paid content — can't fill in a Stripe
form at all. Micropayments have always been the obvious answer and
have always failed on friction and fees.
The solution
Pico turns any piece of content into a pay-per-unlock link with fees
low enough that a $0.10 price still makes sense. Two rails, one
paywall:
- Humans tap once and pay with USDC on Base (Coinbase Smart
Wallet, FaceID) or native CSPR on the Casper Network (Casper
Wallet) — no seed phrases, no forms.
- Autonomous agents hit the same content over an x402-style HTTP
402 flow: request → machine-readable price quote → on-chain payment
→ retry with proof → content. On Casper, Pico verifies every
transfer directly against the node, so an unlock is only ever
granted for a real, executed on-chain transaction.
Creators paste a wallet key, set a price, share a link. That's the
whole onboarding.
Casper Network support (testnet + mainnet)
Built for the Casper Agentic Buildathon 2026.
Full docs: docs/CASPER.md
NEXT_PUBLIC_CASPER_NETWORK=casper-test (default) or casper switches the rail between Casper Testnet and Mainnet- Human checkout: ⚡ Pay with Casper (CSPR) on every
/p/[id] link — deploy signed by the Casper Wallet extension, verified on-chain server-side before unlock
- Agent checkout:
GET /api/casper/content/[id] returns HTTP 402 with machine-readable payment requirements; retry with X-Casper-Deploy-Hash after paying
- Creators enable the rail by saving their Casper public key in the dashboard
Live on Casper Testnet
Agentic payments
Pico isn't just agent-compatible — it ships its own autonomous
buyer and an MCP server, so the full agent economy loop runs inside
this repo: an AI with a budget discovers content, reasons about value,
pays on-chain, and consumes what it bought. No human, no browser.
1. The buyer agent (agent/buyer.js)
An autonomous purchasing agent with its own Casper account, a goal,
and a hard budget:
# one-time: create the agent's keypair (PEM, gitignored)
npm run agent:keygen
# fund the printed public key with free testnet CSPR (1000 CSPR):
# https://testnet.cspr.live/tools/faucet
# let it shop
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-… # enables Claude-powered decisions
npm run agent -- --goal "learn AI prompt engineering" --budget 50
The agent browses /api/casper/discover, fetches the 402 quote for
each item, and asks Claude whether the content is worth the price
given its goal and remaining budget. Spending policy (per-item cap,
session budget, balance check) is enforced in code, before the
model is consulted — the AI chooses within its allowance, never
over it. Every purchase is a real native transfer on Casper, linked
from the console output to cspr.live. Without an API key it falls
back to a conservative heuristic; --yes skips reasoning entirely.
2. The MCP server (agent/mcp-server.js)
Exposes the rail as Model Context Protocol tools so any MCP-capable
assistant (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, custom agents) can buy Pico
content mid-conversation:
| Tool | Does |
|---|
wallet_status | agent account, live on-chain balance, spend cap |
discover_content | the paid-content catalog |
get_quote | 402 payment requirements for one item |
pay_and_unlock | sign + broadcast the CSPR transfer, verify on-chain, return content |
# register with Claude Code
claude mcp add pico -- node agent/mcp-server.js
# env: PICO_BASE_URL, CASPER_AGENT_KEY_PATH, MCP_MAX_SPEND_CSPR (default 25)
3. The pricing agent (agent/pricer.js) — seller-side autonomy
The buyer agent makes the fan side autonomous. This one makes the
seller side autonomous too — closing the agent-economy loop:
# creator opts in per link + sets min/max on the dashboard, then:
DATABASE_URL=... npm run pricer # dry-run: propose + log, no writes
DATABASE_URL=... npm run pricer -- --apply # write the nudge to production
For every opted-in link, the agent reads the last 7 days of
widget_views vs payments (Pico's built-in conversion funnel), asks
Claude for a price nudge grounded in that funnel, and writes the
proposal to the price_reviews audit table with the reason. Human
control stays intact: the creator sets the bounds, the agent can only
nudge inside them, and a 24h cooldown prevents cascades. Falls back to
a simple heuristic if ANTHROPIC_API_KEY isn't set. Point a cron at
npm run pricer -- --apply to run nightly.
4. Agent discovery
Crawling agents can learn to transact with Pico unassisted:
/llms.txt (human/LLM-readable how-to) and
/.well-known/x402 (machine-readable manifest of both rails).
Wallets & faucet
- Humans: Casper Wallet browser
extension — used by the Pay-with-CSPR button. (CSPR.click is the
planned upgrade for a passkey-style UX.)
- Agents: no browser wallet —
npm run agent:keygen creates a raw
ed25519 keypair; the PEM stays on disk (gitignored) and signing
happens locally.
- Testnet funding: https://testnet.cspr.live/tools/faucet — free
5,000 CSPR, once per account.
Agentic roadmap
- Budget wallets (spend policies as a product): today the MCP
server enforces a per-item env cap; the full version is per-agent
sub-accounts with owner-set daily limits, creator allowlists, and
spend reporting — enforced server-side before any deploy is signed.
- CSPR → fiat settlement bridge: sweep creator CSPR earnings
through an instant-exchange swap into USDC on Base, exiting via the
existing Transak/Ramp off-ramp — closing the fiat loop with one
integration.
This is a Next.js project bootstrapped with create-next-app.
Getting Started
First, run the development server:
npm run dev
# or
yarn dev
# or
pnpm dev
# or
bun dev
Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.
You can start editing the page by modifying app/page.tsx. The page auto-updates as you edit the file.
This project uses next/font to automatically optimize and load Geist, a new font family for Vercel.
Open source
Pico is fully open source under the MIT licence — the Next.js app, the
PicoRouter Odra contract, the buyer and pricing agents, and the MCP server are all
in this repository. Nothing is held back except secrets: wallet keys (*.pem,
agent/keys/), environment files and build artefacts are gitignored, as they
should be.
Note: "private": true in package.json is the npm flag that prevents the app
from being published to the npm registry. It says nothing about this repository,
which is public.
Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md, the
code of conduct and the security policy.
