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

App	https://pico-payment-casper.vercel.app
On-chain payments	payer account activity
PicoRouter contract (Odra)	hash-b4b5d701…a0608c — 95/5 fee splitter, source, deploy tx

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.