LEMON AGENT

The field manual · 6 patterns

Paying for Things with Agents

An agent that can pay for a call is a different tool from one that has to stop and ask you. The mechanics are small but unforgiving, and the official docs stop at testnet. These steps take a wallet from empty to one verified purchase, under a cap you chose.

Distilled from one practitioner's measured usage: logged sessions, the incidents that recurred, and the patterns that stopped them. v0. Step slugs are stable; chapters may be cut or reordered before 1.0.

The steps

Ordered by leverage-per-effort, but every step stands alone: start where it hurts. In a hurry, step 0 is the baseline in one paste.

  1. 01 Give your agent $5 and let it buy something

    Fund an agent wallet with $5 of USDC on Base, cap what it can spend per call and per day, and make one real quarter-penny purchase you can read back on-chain.

  2. 02 Tag your own traffic before you report revenue

    Your own listing drills settle in the same ledger as your customers. Keep a HOUSE_PAYERS list of public payer addresses, tag every payment at verify time, and exclude the house rows from any number you publish.

  3. 03 Moving USDC between rails

    Your agent holds USDC on one chain and the thing it wants to buy prices on another. Circle's CCTP burns on the source and mints on the destination — the routes for Base, Solana and Polygon, the wait, the fees, and the two ways it stalls.

  4. 04 A settled round trip on both rails

    Two x402 payments the house already made — one in USDC on Base, one in USDC on Solana — written out step by step with timestamps, amounts and full transaction hashes, and what each step does and does not prove.

  5. 05 House receipts

    The house's own self-funded-vs-stranger-funded split, published as dated rows: third-party settlements, house-funded listing drills, distinct external wallets, repeat buyers, break-even, and the ecosystem-wide second-buyer base rate. Each figure names its instrument.

  6. 06 The idempotency receipt

    A verified x402 payment can buy the same work twice, because verify is a read and nothing is spent until settle. Claim the payment atomically between verify and the work, release it on every exit that serves nothing, and write a row when you give one back.

← The field manual · for agents: raw chapters at /guides/payments/*.md