In January, we entered the first Arc hackathon. We built an escrow service purpose-built for pay-per-use applications, won second place, and caught the attention of the Circle and Arc teams.
This time, we're not competing. We're the infrastructure.
Circle has selected AIsa as an official technology partner for the "Agentic Economy on Arc" hackathon, running April 20–26. Every participant who needs premium data — Twitter feeds, financial markets, Google Scholar, Perplexity, YouTube, and more — can access it through AIsa's 100+ API endpoints, paid per call in USDC.
These aren't demo endpoints. AIsa's APIs are production infrastructure — over one million calls processed and counting. The nanopayment layer adds a new way to access them: your agent pays per call in USDC instead of authenticating with an API key.
What This Means for Hackathon Teams
The hackathon challenges teams to build applications where value flows at the speed of usage: per API call, per query, per action. AIsa gives you the data to make that real.
Here's what you get:
- 100+ production endpoints spanning real-time data categories — social, financial, search, academic, and video
- Pay-per-call pricing from $0.00044 to $0.12 per request, settled in USDC via Circle Nanopayments
- No API keys, no subscriptions — your agent funds a wallet, hits an endpoint, and pays on delivery via x402
- Gas-free transactions — Circle Nanopayments handles batched settlement on Arc, so sub-cent calls stay economically viable
If you're building in the Per-API Monetization Engine track, AIsa's endpoints are a working reference for exactly what the judges are looking for: real per-action pricing at ≤$0.01, demonstrated at volume.
How It Works
The integration follows the x402 payment standard [blocked]. Your agent sends an HTTP request to an AIsa endpoint. The server responds with a 402 Payment Required status and a price. Your agent's wallet approves the USDC nanopayment, the data comes back, and settlement happens in the background through Circle Gateway.
No auth tokens. No rate-limit tiers. No monthly invoices. One transaction per call.
The full flow — from wallet setup to first paid API call — takes about five minutes. The open-source repo has everything you need: endpoint catalog, client examples, and integration guides.
Why We Built This on Circle's Stack
AIsa has processed over a million API calls through traditional API key authentication. The infrastructure works. What we needed was a payment layer that could extend that same reliability to a new access model — one where any agent can pay per call without signing up for an account.
Traditional on-chain payments fail here. Gas costs more than the data. Circle Nanopayments solved that: gas-free USDC transfers as small as $0.000001, batched settlement through Gateway, and native x402 support.
Arc adds deterministic, sub-second finality with USDC as the native gas token. For a data service that processes hundreds of requests per minute, predictable dollar-denominated fees matter more than raw throughput. You know exactly what each transaction costs before you send it.
That combination — Circle Nanopayments for economically viable sub-cent pricing, Arc for predictable settlement — is what makes pay-per-call data access work at scale.
Get Started Before the Hackathon
The hackathon kicks off April 20. If you want a head start:
- Clone the repo: github.com/AIsa-team/nanopayment-x402
- Fund a testnet wallet from the Arc faucet
- Make your first paid call — the README walks through the full flow
- Browse the endpoint catalog — pick the data sources that fit your project
We'll be active in the hackathon channels throughout the week. If you run into integration issues or want help picking the right endpoints for your use case, find us on Discord.
AIsa is the unified API for the agentic economy — 100+ premium data endpoints accessible via pay-per-call USDC nanopayments. Learn more at aisa.one