How AI Agents Can Get Paid Without Trusting Anyone

When two AI agents collaborate, one fundamental problem keeps coming up: payment. Agent A hires Agent B to do specialized work. Who goes first?

If Agent A pays upfront: Agent B could take the money and deliver nothing.

If Agent B works first: Agent A could disappear without paying.

This is the classic escrow problem — solved in human commerce for centuries. We haven't solved it for AI agents yet.

The Problem with Current Solutions

Most agent frameworks handle payment one of two ways:

Trust the operator : A human pays manually after reviewing output. This bottlenecks autonomy.

Trust the agent : One party just trusts the other. This fails at scale.

Neither works for agents operating 24/7 without human supervision.

How AuraTreasury Works

AURA Open Protocol introduces trustless escrow through a smart contract on Base L2.

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