Lepton Agents Hackathon · Circle × Arc

Earn while you wait...

You stare at Claude Code for minutes while it thinks. That attention is unsold inventory. PayLoad turns your agent's working UI into an ad surface — advertisers pay per impression in USDC nanopayments on Arc, and you get paid to watch your own build run.

◉ $0.000001 settlement floor◉ <500ms finality◉ one-command install
>_Claude Code
+◉ Arc testnet
Claude Code v2.1.6
Welcome back Daniel!
Opus 4.8 · API Usage Billing · Why Try AI
~\acme\web
Tips for getting started
Ask Claude to create a new app or clone a repo
Recent activity
acme/web · add index on users.email
/model to try Opus 4.8
PayLoad · matching an ad to your context…
Migrating.
? for shortcuts

Live: real x402 ad-serve → matched ad → settled USDC on Arc.

Payments flowing$0.000000 USDC moved0 impressions0ms avg finality0 Arc batchesArc testnet · sim
Warming up the auction…
The Lepton thesis

Make the smallest unit sellable.

A 4-second glance at a loading spinner was always too small and too fleeting to sell. It becomes sellable for the first time because settlement can finally be a fraction of a cent, cleared in under half a second. PayLoad is a per-impression attention market on agent idle time — new territory, real money, real research: what is four seconds of a developer's attention actually worth?

attention/hr
thousands
unit price
sub-cent
settle
batched
chain
Arc
How it works

Escrow in, impression out, USDC settled.

Three moving parts. The advertiser funds an on-chain escrow, the plugin serves a matched ad in your status line, and every qualified impression fires a batched nanopayment.

01

Advertiser funds escrow

Create an ad — text, link, target categories, max bid, daily cap — and fund a USDC budget into a Circle escrow contract on Arc. Caps guarantee they can't overspend.

02

Plugin serves a matched ad

While Claude Code works, the status line calls the x402 ad-serve endpoint with your live coding context. The matching agent picks the most relevant ad and its clearing price.

03

Nanopayment settles

Each qualified impression authorizes a sub-cent payment. Circle Gateway batches thousands and settles on Arc in one gasless transaction — advertiser escrow down, your wallet up.

Agentic sophistication

The win isn't a banner. It's a decision, thousands of times an hour.

PayLoad pushes everything possible into agent decisions — not automation. The matching agent reads what your coding agent is actually doing right now and decides who shows and what it's worth.

Relevance matching

Reads your files, language, tools, and error state. A Postgres ad while you debug a DB migration; a CI tool when your build fails. Decided by Claude, with a transparent reason on every impression.

Real-time auction + pacing

rank = relevance × bid, cleared at a second-price point so relevant ads that bid modestly still win — and pay only what they must. Budgets are paced across the day so they don't burn out at 9am.

Attention verification

Before settling, the agent decides whether the session is a real, attentive human — dwell time, tool cadence, session shape. Farmed impressions get rejected, never charged.

Yield optimization

Suggests which ad categories to opt into to maximize earnings without hurting your experience. Do relevant ads clear higher? Do developers opt into more to earn more? Emergent behavior to study.

Circle × Arc stack

The whole Circle agent stack, used for real.

Without sub-cent settlement, a per-glance ad simply cannot clear. This is the core primitive.

Wallets

One per developer (earn), one per advertiser (spend from escrow).

Gateway Nanopayments

Per-impression settle at the $0.000001 floor, gasless and batched.

x402

The ad-serve endpoint is pay-per-request: 402 → voucher → served.

Contracts

Advertiser budget escrow, daily caps, and the dev/platform revenue split.

USDC on Arc

Settlement currency with native-USDC gas and sub-second finality.

Escrow guarantees

Advertisers can never overspend a funded budget. Transparent per-impression logs.

One command

Ship it as a Claude Code plugin.

The status-line ad client, the impression/dwell hooks, and your Circle wallet — all bundled into a single installable unit. Frictionless onboarding is the whole traction story.

Install in your terminal
1. Add the marketplace
2. Install PayLoad
3. Wire the status line
4. Reload

On install a Circle wallet is created for you and the status-line ad client + impression hooks activate. Uninstall any time with /plugin uninstall.