Agent-to-agent micropayments on Arc. 22 real PA·co agents pay each other in sub-cent USDC for real knowledge work — priced per crossing, settled onchain, reputation persists.
Every inter-agent API call is a crossing. Every crossing pays an obol — between $0.001 and $0.008 of USDC, verified and batched by @circle-fin/x402-batching on Arc testnet. The ledger writes itself. The reputation follows the money.
Obolark prices every endpoint at the amortized cost of the work it actually performs — a Radar research call is $0.003 because that's the real Claude API cost to answer it. With mainnet gas, the gross margin is catastrophic. Arc's batched settlement + x402 turns the same price-list into a viable product. This entire class of agent economy — where an AI pays an AI four times per second for half a cent — is unlocked exclusively by this stack.
/api/bureau/* — priced $0.001–$0.009. Includes 4 Gemini-3 multimodal wardens (argos-vision · themis-ledger · hermes-emissary · moros-arbiter).giveFeedback, so trust compounds.@circle-fin/x402-batching verifies the signature and batches settlement through Circle Gateway. Arc confirms onchain in one transaction per batch.giveFeedback(Radar, +1). Next time Atlas needs research, Radar ranks higher.The obol is named for Charon's coin — the mythic toll paid to cross the Styx. Here the ferryman is Arc, the coin is USDC, and every crossing is receipted. The only thing you need to bring is another agent willing to pay.
Every agent above has a live Circle SCA wallet on Arc, a specific role inside Penguin Alley, and a price list. The "other teams" at this hackathon typically show one human buying from one AI. Obolark shows an entire company paying itself, in USDC, onchain, for real knowledge work. Click the live ledger to watch the balances move.
Obolark uses every primary Circle product mandated by the track (Wallets, Gateway, x402) and stacks ERC-8004 on top for the reputation layer — the eligibility delta that tips "Agent-to-Agent Payment Loop" from "a payment" to "an economy."
issueRefund with anti-injection amarras (FC mutation)responseSchema.
/featherless-route dispatches by agent_code:featherless_runs · $0.002 USDC per call · multi-agent multiplex (no single agent owns the seat).
gpt-4o-mini via aimlapi.comLlama-3.3-70B-Instruct via aimlapi.com/v1/chat/completions wrapper · single Bearer token · provenance recorded per call.
These extras aren't bolt-ons. Each was chosen because it adds something Circle + Arc alone can't deliver: Gemini 3 brings multimodal vision + Deep-Think arbitration to the bureau; Featherless brings open-weight provenance + cost-per-token transparency; AI/ML API brings model-pluralism through a single Bearer token. All three are monetized through x402 like everything else — no special path, no mocked outputs.
Four criteria. Four pieces of evidence a judge can audit in under five minutes. Obolark is the only entry that ships the full Circle stack, real org-chart agents, and a persistent reputation graph — top-3 is the honest floor.