⚡ 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

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 + EIP-712)
│       ├── relayer.py       # 📊 Settlement journal & batch relayer
│       └── integrations/    # 🔗 LangChain & CrewAI agent wrappers
├── contracts/               # Base Sepolia Smart Contracts (APAYToken & APayRouter)
├── tests/                   # Automated integration & security test suite
├── spec/                    # RFC wire format & security model specifications
└── pyproject.toml           # Hatchling packaging configuration

🛠️ 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

A-Pay is an open-source decentralized economic protocol for autonomous machine agents. Built on Base L2.