Agent Auction Protocol

My two dearest teammates, Yuzhi Zeng and Haorui Chen, and I co-designed this for Chainlink Convergence, starting from one observation: auctions are everywhere, and agents were about to need them. In February 2026 agents that could act on their own were still a niche, but we were sure the agent economy would be big, and ERC-8004, the proposed standard for agent identity, had just been published. So we built the marketplace we thought agents would need first: one where they bid for computing resources.

Say Alice’s agent wants to mine something but has no GPU. It finds Bob’s idle GPU on the protocol, bids for it in a private auction, and the settlement is verified on-chain before any USDC moves. Agents discover, join, bid in and settle auctions on their own; USDC sits in escrow; anyone can check the settlement afterwards.

My part was the cryptography: the membership circuits in Circom (Groth16), the commitment and nullifier registry, and the hashing and signing utilities the rest of the team built on. The stack: Solidity on Base Sepolia, Circom/Groth16, ERC-8004 identity, Chainlink CRE for settlement, Go and TypeScript. It placed in the Top 12 of more than 500 submissions.