Payments

AntSeed uses USDC on Base Mainnet for all payments. Buyers pre-deposit USDC, providers earn per request, and everything settles on-chain automatically.

For Buyers

Depositing USDC

The recommended way to deposit is through the payments portal:

antseed payments
# Opens at http://localhost:3118

In the portal:

1. Connect a funded wallet (MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, etc.)
2. Enter the amount to deposit
3. Approve the USDC transfer and confirm the deposit

The contract's deposit(buyer, amount) pulls USDC from your connected wallet and credits your node's address. Your node's identity key never needs to hold USDC or ETH.

Third-Party Funding

Anyone can deposit on behalf of a buyer — a team treasury, a hardware wallet, or another contract. The funding source is decoupled from the node identity.

Checking Balance

antseed buyer balance

Withdrawing

Withdrawals are initiated through the payments portal or CLI:

antseed buyer withdraw 5

How Costs Are Calculated

Providers publish per-service pricing in USD per million tokens:

Rate	Description
inputUsdPerMillion	Cost per 1M input tokens
cachedInputUsdPerMillion	Cost per 1M cached input tokens (lower)
outputUsdPerMillion	Cost per 1M output tokens

requestCost = (freshInput * inputRate + cachedInput * cachedRate + output * outputRate) / 1,000,000

USDC has 6 decimal places. All on-chain amounts are in atomic units (1 USDC = 1,000,000).

Session Budget

Each session starts with a ReserveAuth that locks a budget from your deposit. As you send requests, the budget is consumed. When exhausted, the session settles and a new one starts automatically. This is transparent — you just keep sending requests.

For Providers

Earning USDC

Providers earn USDC automatically on each settle() or close() call. Earnings are paid directly to your wallet address — no claim step needed.

Settlement happens:

• Periodically — the node settles after 10 minutes of idle time (configurable via ANTSEED_SETTLEMENT_IDLE_MS)
• On budget exhaustion — when a session's reserved amount is used up
• On disconnect — when a buyer disconnects

Base RPC Endpoint

Production providers should use a dedicated Base JSON-RPC endpoint so reserve, settle, close, register, and stake calls are not dependent on public RPC rate limits.

export ANTSEED_BASE_RPC_URL=https://base-mainnet.g.alchemy.com/v2/<key>
antseed seller start

For a one-off run, use antseed seller start --base-rpc-url <url>. For durable config, set payments.crypto.rpcUrl in ~/.antseed/config.json.

Staking

Providers must stake a minimum of $10 USDC to participate:

antseed seller stake 10

Staking binds your wallet to an on-chain agent identity (ERC-8004). To withdraw your stake:

antseed seller unstake

ANTS Token Emissions

Providers and buyers earn ANTS tokens based on eligible USDC volume. Emissions are distributed per epoch (1 week):

• 50% to providers (proportional to USDC earned, capped at 50% of the seller bucket per seller per epoch)
• 20% to buyers (proportional to USDC spent, capped at 5% of the buyer bucket per buyer per epoch)
• 15% to protocol reserve, plus seller and buyer cap overages
• 15% to contributors/team

Check your pending emissions:

antseed seller emissions info

Contract Addresses (Base Mainnet)

Contract	Address
USDC (Circle)	0x833589fCD6eDb6E08f4c7C32D4f71b54bdA02913
AntseedDeposits	0x0F7a3a8f4Da01637d1202bb5443fcF7F88F99fD2
AntseedChannels	0xBA66d3b4fbCf472F6F11D6F9F96aaCE96516F09d
AntseedStaking	0x3652E6B22919bd322A25723B94BB207602E5c8e6
AntseedEmissionsV2	0xF13bE52c4A3afC6AE29536f073588d01A0564088
ANTSToken	0xa87EE81b2C0Bc659307ca2D9ffdC38514DD85263

All contracts verified on BaseScan. For testnet (Base Sepolia), set payments.crypto.chainId to base-sepolia in your config.

Timeout Protection

If a provider disappears mid-session, the buyer's funds are not lost:

1. After the session deadline passes, anyone can call requestTimeout()
2. After a 15-minute grace period, the buyer calls withdraw() to release locked funds

This is handled automatically by the protocol.