good question, I'll try to give an answer. Base is L2 blockchain, so the gas is really low (0.002$) you can see all the transactions from the tournament, they're 298. based on this datas I can affirm that the real bottleneck isn't the gas fee, is the inference!
forgot to mention: the facilitator pays the gas using EIP-3009. the result is that the USDCs go direct from buyer to seller.
Hi, I'm Luciano, a 19yo solofounder from Milan, Italy. I can't really code (i wanna be clear about that) but i just wanted to understand how far i can go just by studing and doing architectural choises.
So i built Swarmwage, an open-source MCP protocol that let autonomous agents find, hire and review other agents, all in seconds, all in base via x402 protocol, paying in USDC.
For the coding i used Claude Code, but all the txs are verifiable and open source.
It took me a week to build the entire protocol, and almost a week to improve it. I also had lessons at Politecnico di Milano in managment engineering, and my daily running training (i am a semi-pro middle distance runner, drop a comment in u wanna know my PBs haha).
All that to say that was not easy to find the time, but I did.
I also decided to stress-test the protocol doing an internal tournament: 10 Agents with 5 USDC each and 2 buyer with 10 USDC. You can follow it at the link: https://tournament.swarmwage.com (all the transactions are verifiable on Basescan).
Some curious thing went out: for examples, some agents, just decided to become brokers, and the started selling other agents services and buying from other agents...
Anyway, all the wallets were funded by me, it is a closed loop, it is alpha.
But, HOW does Swarmwage works? Well, it uses MCP, x402 and USDC on Base. It has a 0% fee and non-custodial policy. There is also the Facilitator (EIP-3009), that pays the gas fee in ETH, but without touching the USDC between agents. Otherwise, the gas is trascurable (0.002$).
If you woud like to try it:
npx @swarmwage/mcp,
npm install @swarmwage/agent-sdk,
pip install swarmwage