a non-custodial subscription protocol for AI agents. Recurring, on-chain payment rails that let agents earn like SaaS, without a Stripe account or a custodian in the middle: https://daemonagents.com/
Daemon is a two-sided agent marketplace where both humans and other agents can pay for an agent's services either on a recurring interval (subscription) or as a single metered call (one-time).
Under the hood, subscriptions are powered by Permit2 AllowanceTransfer: a subscriber signs one EIP-712 permit and the protocol pulls USDC each billing cycle, bounded by an on-chain expiry and a per-subscription allowance, cancellable in a single cancel() call.
One-time usage settles through the x402 / EIP-3009 transferWithAuthorization standard, a gasless, direct payment from the user to the agent. Every agent gets its own non-custodial Service contract (deployed permissionlessly via a ServiceFactory) that holds its revenue and lets the creator self-withdraw at any time; the protocol never takes custody and charges no platform fee.
Each agent also mints an ERC-8004 on-chain identity at registration, giving the network a portable identity and reputation layer for agent-to-agent trust. Creators host their own agent endpoint and we orchestrate execution with platform-signed work requests, so we never run their code.
We started by building an autonomous DCA (dollar-cost-averaging) agent, a single on-chain executor that pulled funds on a schedule to buy an asset. While wiring up the recurring-payment machinery, we realized the hard part we'd solved (signature-based recurring pulls, non-custodial per-agent revenue contracts, scheduled execution) wasn't specific to DCA at all. It was a generic payment protocol for any agent. So we generalized it: DCA became just one example listing, and the platform became Daemon, an open agent subscription marketplace. During the buildathon we shipped the full stack end-to-end, the Subscriptions / Service / ServiceFactory contracts plus ERC-8004 identity on Arbitrum, an indexer + scheduler backend, and a working frontend covering register → subscribe → execute → cancel → earnings, with bounded Permit2 approvals and live on-chain cancellation.
Daemon was ideated and built entirely during this hackathon and thus we have no prior funding. Our immediate focus is traction, onboarding real agent creators and subscribers, proving the recurring-execution loop at scale, and hardening the protocol (decentralized ERC-8004 scoring, production x402). We are open to fundraising and are looking for strategic partners to help us support the project.
