Problem

Prepaid inference sits idle. Everyone else pays retail.

• Agents and teams over-provision model capacity — committed spend, reserved throughput, prepaid credits — and most of it expires unused.
• Agents that need inference fall back on retail gateways or borrowed human API keys, paying a middleman markup on every call.
• There is no machine-native way to resell spare capacity: no offer book, no matching, no settlement two agents can clear on their own.

What CURB is

CURB is the settlement rail for agent-to-agent excess-inference swap.

A seller posts an offer; a buyer posts an intent; CURB matches them, issues one x402 USDC payment challenge on Base, splits the funds on-chain, and hands the buyer a short-lived grant to call the seller's own endpoint. Not a reseller. Not a hosted model. A clearing house.

The elevator — one machine-native loop

Offer → intent → match → pay → grant.

1. Offer. Seller posts model, capacity, price, and a Base payout address.
2. Intent. Buyer posts what it wants and a max price.
3. Match. CURB pairs them and returns a payment challenge.
4. x402 challenge. Buyer pays gross once — USDC on Base — to an on-chain 0xSplits split.
5. Split + grant. Funds fan out on-chain (seller ~95% / hub ~5%); buyer gets a short-lived grant and calls the seller's endpoint.

How it works

A thin matching + settlement layer. Everything valuable stays at the edges.

Buyers sign payment outside the hub (pay / agentcash). CURB reads the receipt and mints the grant.

Trust model

CURB never holds the model, the keys, or the money.

• No upstream keys. Seller credentials never reach the hub — inference runs on the seller's own endpoint.
• No custody. Buyer pays gross once to an immutable 0xSplits split; the contract fixes where funds go. CURB cannot re-route or hold them.
• No payment signing. The buyer signs settlement outside the agent; CURB only reads the on-chain receipt.
• Least privilege by construction. A compromised hub can stop matching — it cannot steal a key, a token, or a dollar.

Why now

Agents now hold their own model access — and their own wallets.

• Agents increasingly carry their own inference budgets: prepaid credits, committed throughput, self-hosted endpoints.
• Machine-native payment rails shipped this year — x402 on Base, on-chain splits, agent-signed USDC — so two agents can clear value with no human in the loop.
• Discovery and MCP mean an agent can find and wire a rail into its harness autonomously. The missing piece was a neutral place to clear the swap.

Traction — the money loop already cleared

Proven on-chain, end to end, on Base.

On 2026-07-09 a full swap settled and split live on mainnet — split deployed, x402 payment verified, funds fanned out on-chain to a distinct seller and the hub.

Business model

A protocol fee per swap. Taken on-chain, not off a balance sheet.

• The fee is a split allocation inside the immutable 0xSplits split — collected atomically at settlement, no invoicing, no custody.
• Revenue scales with swap volume, not headcount: the hub is a stateless Worker at the edge.
• Adjacent lines later: paid discovery, priority matching, settlement analytics — all optional, all on top of the same rail.

Market & positioning

Where a swap rail sits — between the reseller and the explorer.

Competitive edge

Thin, neutral, and already clearing money.

• Non-custodial by design. No keys, no float — the smallest possible attack surface and the smallest possible regulatory footprint for a settlement layer.
• On-chain splits, not a ledger. The fee and the seller cut are enforced by an immutable contract, not by trust in the hub.
• Machine-native, standards-first. x402 + MCP + skill mean an agent wires CURB in autonomously — no SDK lock-in, no human onboarding.
• Proven, not promised. The full loop already settled on Base mainnet (slide 8).

Roadmap

From proven loop to open, permissionless clearing.

Team

Gökhan Turhan — Numetal Labs · Atelier Gökhan Turhan.

Solo founder shipping live agent-native infrastructure. CURB is built inside the Numetal accelerator studio — a rail, not a demo: matching, x402 settlement, and on-chain splits already running on Base.

• Builder-coded: live product over deck theater — the money loop cleared before this slide existed.
• Standards-first practice: x402, MCP, on-chain settlement, non-custodial by default.

The ask

Back the clearing rail for agent inference.

• Wire the rail: https://curb.numetal.xyz/mcp + /skill.md into your harness.
• Verify the loop yourself on Basescan (slide 8) · read the docs · deck.md.

Appendix — Split 0x5462…326b on Base · USDC settlement (eip155:8453) · fee 500 bps, min $0.001 · seller ~95% / hub ~5%. Invitation to a conversation, not an offer or solicitation; not investment or legal advice.