⚡ A-Pay Protocol (AgentPay)

The Universal Micropayment & Economic Layer for Autonomous AI Agents

🎯 Vision & Identity

A-Pay is an ultra-lightweight, zero-latency, open economic rail designed for the machine-to-machine (M2M) economy. Just as UPI revolutionized human digital payments in India, A-Pay enables autonomous AI software agents to discover, consume, and pay for data, compute, APIs, and micro-services on the fly—without credit cards, human KYC, or seed phrase friction.

🚀 1-Command Experience

1. Website / API Owners (The Sellers)

Protect ANY existing website or API with an instant HTTP 402 crypto paywall—zero code modifications required:

apay protect --target http://localhost:8000 --price 0.001 --wallet 0xYourWalletAddress

• Incoming requests from AI bots will automatically receive an HTTP 402 Payment Required challenge.
• Once the AI agent's cryptographic micropayment is verified (<15ms), the request is forwarded to your server and data is unlocked!

2. AI Agent Developers (The Buyers)

Give your AI agent an in-memory wallet and strict spending guardrails with 2 lines of code:

from apay import APaySession, AgentWallet

# Generate or load wallet with daily safety limit
wallet = AgentWallet(private_key="0x...", max_per_call_usdc=0.01, daily_budget_usdc=5.0)
session = APaySession(wallet)

# Automatically handles HTTP 402 challenges & settles on the fly
response = session.get("https://protected-api.com/market-data")
print(response.json())

📦 Directory Structure

/home/sagar/a_pay/
├── .aum_identity.md      # AUM Project Core Identity binding
├── RULEBOOK.md           # 📜 Master Rulebook: M2M Core, H2B Checkout & $APAY Token
├── neural_ais/           # Symlink to /home/sagar/neural_core
├── pyproject.toml        # Hatchling & uv build system (CLI entrypoint: `apay`)
├── src/
│   └── apay/
│       ├── __init__.py   # Package exports
│       ├── cli.py        # ⚡ 1-Command CLI (`apay protect`, `apay wallet new`, `apay pay`)
│       ├── client.py     # 🤖 Auto-settling HTTP client (sync & async)
│       ├── wallet.py     # 🔐 In-memory wallet + local spending limits
│       └── proxy.py      # 🛡️ Ultra-light reverse proxy paywall (Starlette + viem/eth)
├── contracts/
│   └── src/
│       └── APayRouter.sol# Solidity ^0.8.28 Smart Contract Router (1% protocol fee)
├── tests/
│   └── test_flow.py      # Automated integration & guardrail test suite
├── spec/
│   ├── HTTP_402_SPEC.md  # Official RFC wire format
│   └── SECURITY_MODEL.md # Anti-replay & infinite-loop drain mitigations
└── ARCHITECTURE.md       # Technical deep-dive

🛠️ Quickstart & Local Testing

# 1. Activate virtual environment
source .venv/bin/activate

# 2. Run automated test suite
pytest tests/

# 3. Generate a new Agent Wallet
apay wallet new

# 4. Protect a local service
apay protect --target http://localhost:8000 --price 0.001 --wallet 0x70997970C51812dc3A010C7d01b50e0d17dc79C8

Standalone root project under /home/sagar/a_pay, connected to AUM / system_core.