Acrux – Programmable Paywall for AI Agents

Overview

AI agents that pay for APIs create a problem traditional payment rails can't solve: you can't price-discriminate per buyer, and chargebacks don't work as a defense. Acrux is drop-in Lightning Network middleware that turns any HTTP route into a paywalled, attack-priced, reputation-aware endpoint, replacing rate limits, API keys and captchas with one Lightning rail and three economic primitives. Built for Hack-Nation Challenge 02, “Earn in the Agent Economy”, sponsored by Spiral; every transaction settles in milliseconds, with no signups, API keys or chargebacks.

Highlights

• Per-load surge pricing: the Lightning invoice price follows measured load on a continuous curve, from 1 sat at idle to 10,000 sats during a detected attack
• Per-wallet attacker pricing: each paying wallet has its own request counter in Redis, so one bad actor pays surge prices while honest agents stay at the base rate
• Reputation staking with slashing: agents stake sats up front, well-behaved wallets earn yield, and slashed stakes fund the honest agents, so attackers pay their targets
• Live operator dashboard polling Redis at 1 Hz, with an honest-agent vs spam-bot demo running against the L402 paywall

Built with

• Next.js
• TypeScript
• Lightning Network (L402)
• MoneyDevKit
• Upstash Redis
• Vercel

Team

• Kshitij Kumar
• Kunal Gupta