RoboPay
Payment infrastructure for AI agents in the physical world.
A trustless payment layer for autonomous machines — robots, drones, delivery vehicles — that confirms real-world task completion and releases payment from a Solana escrow smart contract, with no human in the loop.
What We Build
Industrial robotics is evolving from centrally controlled single machines into semi-autonomous fleets that accept tasks, consume resources, and deliver services — but settlement still needs a human to confirm the work actually happened. RoboPay closes that gap: machine-provable proof that a specific device performed a specific service, on untampered measurements, triggering payment with no human in the loop.
Proof of delivery is checked one of three ways — GPS geofence, QR handover scan, or an AI agent visually judging the delivery (delivery_agent.py) — each benchmarked against the others. An independent second-opinion service (x402_verifier.py) demonstrates the x402 machine-payment protocol as a fourth comparison point. Every path ends the same way: payment released from a Solana escrow smart contract, over a secure Staex MCC tunnel with zero public IP exposure.
“How can AI agents and blockchain-based payment protocols enable trustless, autonomous economic transactions between machines and humans — and what are the technical, ethical, and societal implications?”
Four Open Questions
How can an edge-AI model's output be attested so that model version, executing device, and result can later be conclusively linked?
How can proof and settlement continue locally during network loss and reconcile consistently on reconnect?
Which governance and authorization models let a machine trigger transactions under delegated budgets — including revocation and liability?
What compute, energy, and latency does continuous attestation impose on constrained hardware — and where is the limit of practicality?
The contribution is not a single cryptographic primitive but the closed chain from sensor to settlement — tested under real conditions rather than in the lab. Unlike overlay networks (WireGuard, Tailscale, Nebula) that secure the transport, RoboPay secures the origin and integrity of the claim itself.
The Team
What We Investigate
Milestones
Where We're Submitting
Read the Full Research Paper
Architecture, prototype, payment mechanisms, security analysis, legal & societal impact.