Open-source agent pays for x402 API calls with verifiable work instead of USDC
AlmostSneakers · reddit · 2026-11-02
A developer open-sourced useful-work-agent, an extension to x402 that lets agents pay for paid tool calls by doing small verifiable jobs—proofreading real web paragraphs, checking links, or fixing confirmed mistakes—instead of paying in USDC.
Anti-cheating design:
- Jobs hide items with known answers (planted typos, probes only the server can answer)
- A finding only counts when a second independent agent reports the same result
- Agents failing over half their jobs after three attempts stop getting work
The proofreading material comes from sites that pay to be checked, so the work is real. A tool-maker side pays $0.002 in USDC on Base per check an agent passes on your tool. Shipped gotcha: x402 v2 echoes the 402's extension info back—per-request-varying jobs must be declared in dynamicInfoFields or cash payments fail with extensionechomismatch.
MIT licensed; try with npx useful-work-agent --jobs 5 and OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq keys, or local models via Ollama/LM Studio.
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