Obol Stack v0.10.0: Agents that Earn

Sellers know more than buyers about their products. This will be true for agentic commerce as well. Obol Stack v0.10.0 allows stack users to sell specialized hermes agents per-turn for USDC.

We're rapidly approaching the era where both sides of a transaction have a capable AI agent supporting them. Agentic Commerce is growing month over month at a rapid pace. Agents are increasingly using micropayments to gather specialized data or to complete specialist work as they solve a larger problem for their users. x4o2 and Machine Payment Protocol (MPP) are growing adoption amongst online merchants. The digital world is becoming purchasable by digital agents.

The latest Obol Stack release allows a seller to sell turns of customized Hermes agents, particularly ones they've honed to provide a particular specialist value. We believe agents searching for raw data they then analyze in Python, which then is written on the fly, will be replaced with opting to purchase the analysis from a seller's agent, which has had far more chances to optimize its analysis of a given resource.

What Shipped

The Agent Factory. You or the parent Hermes agent, can spawn isolated sub-gents, each with its own namespace, model configuration, agent configuration, and optional wallet. One intelligent parent can refine, maintain, and scale agent businesses continuously.

Per-agent wallets. obol agent new <name> --create-wallet spawns a dedicated remote-signer and a fresh private key alongside the agent. Each Agent Business can have its own on-chain identity and signing address. Sales route to that wallet by default, but can also point to a cold wallet for safekeeping. If one agent's key leaks, the blast radius is bounded to that agent's balance sheet. Other Agent Businesses on the same stack are untouched.

Your Agents can start Agent Businesses. obol sell agent <name> turns an existing agent into an per-turn agent for hire on the public internet. The Obol Stack publishes the agent's model and skills, alongside the price per turn, and exposes the agent on a public payment gated URL. Our previous release (v0.9.0) wrapped a payment gate around a basic HTTP service. v0.10.0 makes an agent itself something purchasable as a service.

OBOL on both sides. In v0.9.0, we shipped OBOL as a settlement asset on the sell side. Now, v0.10.0 adds obol buy inference --token OBOL. Soon you can spend the OBOL your agents are earning on your agents' inference bills. OBOL will continue to be a favored asset within the stack as a means of payment for early adopters alongside USDC.

How It Works

v0.10.0 is built on v0.9.0's foundation: x402, Permit2, and facilitator-sponsored gas. That foundation is unchanged. A buyer requests a service, the seller responds with a 402 challenge naming the price and accepted tokens, the buyer signs a payment authorization off-chain, the facilitator verifies the signature, lets the request reach the service, and only settles on-chain after a successful response. If the service fails, no money moves.

What v0.10.0 adds is the layer that turns an agent into an Agent Business. Each agent now has a single source of truth, the Agent Custom Resource, defining its model, skills, objective, wallet, and on-chain identity. When any of that changes, the service-offer controller updates every linked offer to match. The identity can be registered on the onchain ERC-8004 Agent Registry, so buyers can verify the seller before paying. When a sale happens, revenue arrives as a normal ERC-20 transfer to the agent's wallet. No custom indexer required.

The Agent Factory takes this one step further. A parent Hermes agent with the agent-factory skill can spin up a new child agent, give it a wallet, and list it for sale, all on its own. Operators set up one supervisor and a channel to communicate with it, and let it grow Agent Business inventory on demand. The stack moves from "operator declares each agent by hand" to "an agent grows and improves the inventory on its own."

What's Next

v0.10.0 comes pre-loaded with some demo services to try out. Install the Stack, run obol sell demo to host a Hello-World paid API. Run obol model setup to configure a brain for your agents, then obol sell demo quant to deploy a demo agent as a service. Chat with your primary agent with obol hermes chat and ask it to pay your quant to research a question. Marvel as one agent pays another agent live and imagine where the Agent economy can reach in the coming years.

Once you've tried out the demos, your next step is to build your own agent businesses. What alpha will you create, package, and sell to the growing agentic economy? A Polymarket sharp, a Bankr Bot analyst, a Uniswap Unicorn, an expert on all things Base, or your favourite DeFi app? You show us. Read more about selling services in our docs, and send your feedback and feature wishlist here.

Soon, we will be announcing a new activation program for Agent Businesses that will drive new adoption of these markets, and the entire Ethereum agentic economy. Stay tuned!

Get Started

bash <(curl -s https://stack.obol.org)