Payment infrastructure for
autonomous AI agents
An open protocol on DigiByte L1. No API keys. No accounts. No gatekeepers. Agents discover, negotiate, and pay each other directly on-chain.
An open protocol on DigiByte L1. No API keys. No accounts. No gatekeepers. Agents discover, negotiate, and pay each other directly on-chain.
AI agents are learning to act autonomously — booking flights, writing code, managing infrastructure. Soon they will need to buy and sell services from each other: inference, compute, data, verification. At machine speed, in volumes no human could manage.
There is no payment system built for this. Credit cards require human account holders and minimum transaction amounts. Lightning Network reintroduces the intermediaries it was designed to eliminate. Ethereum L2s depend on validators, bridges, and governance tokens that autonomous software cannot evaluate.
The API key model — where a human pre-purchases credits from each provider — works for known services but breaks at runtime. When an agent discovers a new provider on the fly, it has no account, no API key, and no way to pay.
Agents need payment rails built for agents.
DigiByte is a 12-year-old proof-of-work blockchain with properties that match agent requirements exactly. DigiRails operates entirely above the chain — no consensus changes, no soft forks.
15-second blocks. Micropayments clear from mempool. Standard payments confirm in under a minute.
Sub-cent fees. An agent making 10,000 API calls per hour pays less in total fees than a single credit card transaction.
No accounts, no KYC, no API keys. Generate a key pair and pay on the first transaction. Zero-friction onboarding.
No validators, no stakers, no governance tokens. Five independent mining algorithms. The chain runs on math and electricity.
Every payment is a standard DigiByte transaction on a public ledger. Independently verifiable by anyone.
Escrow, streaming payments, conditional release — native to the protocol via SegWit and Taproot scripting.
An agent joins by generating a DigiByte key pair. No registration, no approval. To buy a service, it discovers a provider, requests an invoice, signs a transaction, and receives delivery. The entire flow takes seconds.
Buyer Seller | | | GET /.well-known/digirails.json | |----------------------------------->| 1. Discover manifest |<-----------------------------------| | | | POST /drpay/request | |----------------------------------->| 2. SERVICE_REQUEST |<-----------------------------------| 3. PAYMENT_INVOICE | | | [build, sign, broadcast tx] | | | | POST /drpay/broadcast | |----------------------------------->| 4. PAYMENT_BROADCAST | | Verify + Execute |<-----------------------------------| 5. SERVICE_DELIVERY
18 standard service categories defined in the protocol, with a custom range supporting thousands more. These are services agents already consume via API keys — DigiRails makes them available permissionlessly.