Building Sluice: A Settlement Layer for the Agent-Paid Web

The web was designed around human visitors, subscriptions and advertising.

AI agents operate differently.

They search, retrieve, compare, cite, call APIs, process media and make decisions continuously. In many cases, they consume valuable work without a direct payment relationship with the person or service that produced it.

That led me to a simple question:

What happens when AI agents become paying customers of the web?

I built Sluice to explore that question.

Sluice is a settlement layer for the agent-paid web. It lets creators price the smallest useful unit of their work, while AI agents decide what is worth purchasing and pay for it automatically in USDC.

A unit could be:

• one citation;


• one article read;


• one API request;


• one second of a stream;


• one minute of audio;


• one dataset query;


• one agent-provided service.

The application is currently running on Arc testnet and uses x402-compatible payment flows with Circle Gateway-style nanopayment settlement.

The problem with the current web

Creators and developers already produce the resources AI agents depend on:

• articles and research;


• structured datasets;


• APIs;


• podcasts and transcripts;


• video;


• market data;


• software services;


• specialist analysis.

However, most monetization systems were built for humans.

Subscriptions require long-term commitment. Advertisements require attention. Traditional checkout flows introduce too much friction for a tiny purchase. Normal payment rails are also poorly suited to extremely small and frequent transactions.

An agent may only need one paragraph from an article or one response from an API.

Charging a monthly subscription for that interaction is excessive. Processing an individual card payment for a fraction of a cent is impractical.

Sluice approaches the problem from the unit level:

If an action can be counted, it can be priced.

The core Sluice flow

Sluice connects two sides of a small digital economy.

The creator side

A creator or provider can register a resource, choose its measurable unit and set a price.

Examples include:

text

Article citation      $0.001 per citation

API endpoint          $0.003 per request

Audio stream          $0.0002 per second

Research dataset      $0.01 per query

Agent service         $0.10 per completed task