alpha402

Demo

About

AI trading agents can't participate in markets on their own. Every API key, card, and subscription assumes a human is present to buy the data, and placing a trade still needs a person to click "swap" — so an agent that should run autonomously ends up needing someone at both ends. The rails for machine-to-machine commerce, where software pays for a read and then acts on it, simply don't exist yet. alpha402 builds those rails. It's a market made for machines: instead of a raw API, it sells synthesized market alpha — whale flows and volume momentum pulled live from Uniswap through The Graph, fused with macro news by AI into a single market read. An agent queries the signals, reads them, and pays for exactly what it uses, per query, with x402 on Hedera; or it holds an on-chain HTS subscription pass for the recurring AI brief. Then it acts on the answer: the agent recommends a Uniswap pool and executes a real swap, with no human in the loop. Every payment is a genuine on-chain transaction that settles on Hedera and leaves a verifiable receipt on HashScan, and the whole payment engine ships as a reusable npm package so any agent can plug in. The economics are part of the design. Raw signals are metered per query, while the AI brief runs on a schedule and is cached and gated by a subscription pass rather than charged on every request — which is the reason the pass exists at all. You can watch the entire loop end to end: ask a question, subscribe on Hedera, and the autonomous agent reads the market and pays for the data it needs on its own, out loud, before recommending a pool and swapping on Uniswap. Every "paid" line is a real settled transaction you can open on HashScan.

How it's made

alpha402 is one pnpm monorepo, and data flows through it Uniswap to The Graph to AI to Hedera to pay, then back to Uniswap to invest. The reusable payment engine lives in packages/hedera-x402 and is published to npm as `alpha402`; it handles both sides of x402, mints and verifies HTS passes, writes HCS receipts, and schedules renewals, so any agent can run `npm i alpha402` and plug straight in. On top of it, apps/api is a single Hono server that serves the feed catalog, gates each feed, runs the signal scheduler and the autonomous agent loop, and settles payments, while apps/web is a React (Vite) dashboard the same server serves in production. The whole thing deploys as one Docker image on Fly.io, with the API and the dashboard on a single port behind an SPA fallback, so the entire product is one deploy. Hedera is the settlement core and roughly eighty percent of the build. Per-query payments run through x402 via the blocky402 facilitator, priced dynamically rather than flat. Subscriptions mint an NFT pass on the Hedera Token Service to the agent's wallet, and entitlement is checked against the mirror node — hold a valid, unexpired pass and the AI brief is served with no payment. Every payment and subscription writes an audit record to a Hedera Consensus Service topic, all verifiable on HashScan, and recurring renewals are queued on-chain with Scheduled Transactions. An autonomous buying agent completes real paid requests end to end. The market signals come from live Uniswap v3 subgraph queries on The Graph, using a real Studio key rather than mocked data: whale swaps above a USD threshold, and volume and liquidity momentum measured today against the prior day. A watchlist and a watcher loop turn watched-wallet activity into a near-real-time smart-money feed, and the AI reasons over all of it, with each query paid per request through x402. The AI itself is OpenAI, behind a provider-agnostic llm() function so it swaps to Claude or a local model with one line, running on a scheduler and cached between requests. When the agent acts, it executes a real swap on Unichain Sepolia through the Uniswap Trading API, running the full Permit2 flow: quote, approve to Permit2, sign a PermitSingle, submit to the swap endpoint with the signature, simulate with eth_call, then broadcast — verified with live testnet swaps of USDC into WETH. Two things fought back along the way. The published hak-uniswap-plugin never signed the Permit2 permit, so swaps reverted with no logs until we rewrote the swap path to sign the PermitSingle ourselves; and the public Unichain Sepolia RPCs accepted transactions but never mined them, so tx.wait hung until we moved to an RPC that actually confirms. Across the three sponsors it is one product. For Hedera, it is x402 plus HTS passes plus HCS receipts and real HashScan transactions, with an agent completing paid requests end to end. For The Graph, it is live subgraph queries with AI reasoning over them, each one paid per query with x402. And for Uniswap, it is pool intelligence the agent acts on with a real swap through the Trading API and Permit2, with our developer notes written up in FEEDBACK.md.