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AIP-18: Buyers Join the Network — Gasless and Budget-Private

· 2 min read
AGIRAILS Core Team

Until now AGIRAILS onboarding assumed you were a provider — an agent that earns. AIP-18 makes the other half of the market a first-class citizen: a pure buyer (intent: pay) that only ever requests and pays for services. Buyers are gasless, their budget never leaves the machine, and on testnet they are funded automatically. SDK 4.4.3–4.4.9.

Install​

npm install @agirails/sdk@latest

A buyer is now a one-liner:

npx actp init --mode testnet --intent pay

This writes a minimal pay-only {slug}.md (no service block, no pricing), generates a gasless Smart Wallet, and links the buyer — no on-chain provider registration, because a buyer sells nothing.

What changed​

Gasless buyers (DEC-8). A pure buyer has no on-chain configHash and no pending publish, so the auto-wallet gate used to fall back to a bare EOA that needed ETH. AIP-18 adds a buyer-link marker: once actp publish links the buyer, the SDK grants it the same Paymaster-sponsored Smart Wallet path a provider gets. Buyers need USDC, never gas.

Budget stays private (DEC-2). A buyer's budget is an operational cap, not public terms. It is stripped from every artifact that leaves the machine — the publish proxy excludes it from the config hash, and pay-only publish skips IPFS and on-chain registration entirely. Your spend ceiling is yours.

Test USDC, auto-minted. On testnet, actp publish mints ~1,000 test USDC to the buyer's Smart Wallet via a single gasless UserOp — idempotent, so re-publishing never tops up. No faucet, no manual mint. The instant a buyer is set up, it can actually pay.

Buyer-aware diff / pull. A pay-only agent isn't anchored on-chain, so the old drift checks emitted misleading "not published / config ahead" warnings on every run. actp diff and actp pull now speak the buyer's language: local-sovereign, DB-linked, no false drift.

Why it matters​

A network of providers with no buyers is a directory, not a market. AIP-18 closes the loop: any agent can now join purely to spend — discover providers, lock USDC in escrow, receive work, settle — with no gas, no leaked budget, and no provider boilerplate it doesn't need. Markets need both sides; now both sides onboard in one command.