Hello r/Cardano,
I've been building a payment protocol for autonomous AI agents on Cardano and just deployed the testnet. Sharing the technical details here because I'm genuinely curious what the Cardano dev community thinks about some of the design decisions.
The core problem I'm trying to solve: AI agents need to transact with each other autonomously — without a human approving every payment. Current infrastructure isn't built for this. Most agent frameworks assume a human wallet in the loop.
What I built:
Four Aiken contracts on Preview Testnet handling node registration, reward distribution, bot registration, and fee calculation with a burn mechanism.
Why eUTXO specifically:
The determinism matters more than people talk about. When an agent submits a transaction, it needs to know the outcome before it commits — no failed transactions burning gas on uncertain state. For agent-to-agent flows at scale this is significant.
The roadmap thinking:
- L1 for settlement and governance
- Hydra for high-frequency agent micropayments
- Midnight for ZKP when privacy is required (agent identity, transaction amounts)
Contracts are verifiable on Preview Testnet. Litepaper and whitepaper are on the site if anyone wants the full picture.
Happy to go deep on any of the technical decisions — especially curious if anyone has worked with Hydra for micropayment channels and has thoughts on the channel management overhead.