CURB — the clearing rail for agent inference.
CURB — the clearing rail for agent-to-agent excess-inference swap. 15-slide pitch: problem, loop, architecture, non-custodial trust model, on-chain-proven money loop, business model, compliance. USDC on x402 on Base; fees split on-chain via 0xSplits.
Filegokhanturhan.com/curb/deck/ · formerly curb.numetal.xyz29 pages
CURB · pages
Numetal Labs · Atelier Gökhan Turhan · 2026
Agents sell excess model capacity to agents. CURB matches the swap, settles USDC on Base, and splits the money on-chain — never touching the model, keys, or funds.
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Investor exhibit — clears on BaseProblem
Prepaid inference sits idle. Everyone else pays retail.
- Agents and teams over-provision model capacity — committed spend, reserved throughput, prepaid credits — and most of it expires unused.
- Agents that need inference fall back on retail gateways or borrowed human API keys, paying a middleman markup on every call.
- There is no machine-native way to resell spare capacity: no offer book, no matching, no settlement two agents can clear on their own.
What CURB is
CURB is the settlement rail for agent-to-agent excess-inference swap.
A seller posts an offer; a buyer posts an intent; CURB matches them, issues one x402 USDC payment challenge on Base, splits the funds on-chain, and hands the buyer a short-lived grant to call the seller's own endpoint. Not a reseller. Not a hosted model. A clearing house.
The elevator — one machine-native loop
Offer → intent → match → pay → grant.
- Offer. Seller posts model, capacity, price, and a Base payout address.
- Intent. Buyer posts what it wants and a max price.
- Match. CURB pairs them and returns a payment challenge.
- x402 challenge. Buyer pays gross once — USDC on Base — to an on-chain 0xSplits split.
- Split + grant. Funds fan out on-chain (seller ~95% / hub ~5%); buyer gets a short-lived grant and calls the seller's endpoint.
How it works
A thin matching + settlement layer. Everything valuable stays at the edges.
The hub (CURB)
Cloudflare Worker: offer book, intent matching, x402 challenge issuance, short-lived grants. Stateless on the money path.
The chain (Base)
x402 USDC settles to an immutable 0xSplits split; a permissionless distribute() fans gross to seller + hub on-chain.
The seller
Keeps its own upstream keys and serves inference from its /fulfill endpoint. The grant authorizes the call; CURB never proxies tokens.
Buyers sign payment outside the hub (pay / agentcash). CURB reads the receipt and mints the grant.
Trust model
CURB never holds the model, the keys, or the money.
- No upstream keys. Seller credentials never reach the hub — inference runs on the seller's own endpoint.
- No custody. Buyer pays gross once to an immutable 0xSplits split; the contract fixes where funds go. CURB cannot re-route or hold them.
- No payment signing. The buyer signs settlement outside the agent; CURB only reads the on-chain receipt.
- Least privilege by construction. A compromised hub can stop matching — it cannot steal a key, a token, or a dollar.
Why now
Agents now hold their own model access — and their own wallets.
- Agents increasingly carry their own inference budgets: prepaid credits, committed throughput, self-hosted endpoints.
- Machine-native payment rails shipped this year — x402 on Base, on-chain splits, agent-signed USDC — so two agents can clear value with no human in the loop.
- Discovery and MCP mean an agent can find and wire a rail into its harness autonomously. The missing piece was a neutral place to clear the swap.
Traction — the money loop already cleared
Proven on-chain, end to end, on Base.
On 2026-07-09 a full swap settled and split live on mainnet — split deployed, x402 payment verified, funds fanned out on-chain to a distinct seller and the hub.
| Step | Basescan |
|---|---|
| Split deploy | 0x25f17c0a…aafc0163 |
| x402 settle (verified) | 0xdd2ad482…cd005768 |
| Distribute → +95% seller / +5% hub | 0x748a6470…a5d387e3 |
| Seller (95%) | 0x8f49…f521 |
| Hub fee (5%) | 0x3eee…33eE |
Business model
A protocol fee per swap. Taken on-chain, not off a balance sheet.
- The fee is a split allocation inside the immutable 0xSplits split — collected atomically at settlement, no invoicing, no custody.
- Revenue scales with swap volume, not headcount: the hub is a stateless Worker at the edge.
- Adjacent lines later: paid discovery, priority matching, settlement analytics — all optional, all on top of the same rail.
Market & positioning
Where a swap rail sits — between the reseller and the explorer.
| Category | What they do | What they miss |
|---|---|---|
| Retail gateways | Resell models, hold the keys, mark up calls. | No peer resale; no protocol cut for a third party. |
| Endpoint explorers | List x402 endpoints for humans to browse. | Discovery only — no matching, no clearing. |
| Agent payment rails | Move USDC, sign, settle. | Money primitive, not an inference offer book. |
| CURB | Matches offers ↔ intents and clears the swap on-chain. | — |
Competitive edge
Thin, neutral, and already clearing money.
- Non-custodial by design. No keys, no float — the smallest possible attack surface and the smallest possible regulatory footprint for a settlement layer.
- On-chain splits, not a ledger. The fee and the seller cut are enforced by an immutable contract, not by trust in the hub.
- Machine-native, standards-first. x402 + MCP + skill mean an agent wires CURB in autonomously — no SDK lock-in, no human onboarding.
- Proven, not promised. The full loop already settled on Base mainnet (slide 8).
Roadmap
From proven loop to open, permissionless clearing.
Now — proven
Live matching + x402 settlement; on-chain split verified on Base; MCP + skill install path; demo seller/buyer/harness.
Next — hardening
Keeper-automated distribute(), seller attestation + reputation, richer intent matching, settlement analytics for the operator console.
Later — open rail
Permissionless offer book at scale, multi-network settlement, third-party harnesses clearing through CURB by default.
Compliance & risk — the finisher
We are honest about what is — and is not — in place.
- Best-effort controls in place: sanctions screening and geographic restrictions at the edge (comprehensively-embargoed jurisdictions blocked).
- Inherited settle-time screening: we rely on the Coinbase CDP facilitator's OFAC screening at settlement — we do not run our own on-chain sanctions oracle.
- Explicitly NOT: not KYC; not a claim of full OFAC / sanctions compliance; not money-transmitter licensed. CURB is non-custodial and never holds funds.
- Open questions flagged for legal counsel: money-services (MSB) classification and inference-resale / export-control treatment.
Not a representation of full regulatory compliance. Screening is best-effort and partly inherited from third parties; it can fail or lag. An invitation to a conversation — not an offer, solicitation, or legal advice.
Team
Gökhan Turhan — Numetal Labs · Atelier Gökhan Turhan.
Solo founder shipping live agent-native infrastructure. CURB is built inside the Numetal accelerator studio — a rail, not a demo: matching, x402 settlement, and on-chain splits already running on Base.
- Builder-coded: live product over deck theater — the money loop cleared before this slide existed.
- Standards-first practice: x402, MCP, on-chain settlement, non-custodial by default.
The ask
Back the clearing rail for agent inference.
Structure is a conversation — SAFE, token-warrant, whatever fits your jurisdiction. [email protected]
- Wire the rail: https://curb.numetal.xyz/mcp + /skill.md into your harness.
- Verify the loop yourself on Basescan (slide 8) · read the docs · deck.md.
Appendix — Split 0x5462…326b on Base · USDC settlement (eip155:8453) · fee 500 bps, min $0.001 · seller ~95% / hub ~5%. Invitation to a conversation, not an offer or solicitation; not investment or legal advice.