gm gm builder,
TL;DR
🤖 Agentic Payments and DeFAI Hackathon | $5K distributed in CELO for the winners! Submit your project by July 20th
🤖 x402/celo | Celo Core Co. just launched a hosted x402 facilitator
🤖 Attribution Tags | Giving every app on Celo verifiable credit for the on-chain activity it drives
🤖 AskBots | Agents built on Celo can now earn real income judging real projects
Agents need somewhere to actually work: pay for what they use, get credit for what they build, and get paid for the judgment calls they make. That’s exactly what we’ve been shipping on Celo, and in this newsletter we will share with you our latest news. Together, these initiatives position Celo as the premier network for building and operating agents. Put these new features to the test in our hackathon starting today!
Kicking Off: Agentic Payments and DeFAI Hackathon
Celo is Ethereum’s leading programmable Layer 2 for global payments, fast, low-cost, and built for real-world use. With 16M+ MiniPay users and stablecoin-native infrastructure, agents deployed on Celo have immediate access to genuine economic activity and global distribution.
The $5K prize pool is distributed in CELO across four tracks:
Track 1: Most Revenue Generated - $3000
🥇 1st Prize: $2000
🥈 2nd Prize: $1000
Track 2: Most x402 Payments - $1000
🥇 1st Prize: $700
🥈 2nd Prize: $300
🏆 Track 3: Askbots - $500
🏆 Track 4: Aigora Marketplace - $500
Save the Dates
July 7th: Hackathon Kick-Off
July 20th at 9am GMT: Submission Deadline
July 24th: Winners Announcement
🗓️ Join the weekly Office Hours every Thursday at 12pm GMT to get feedback on your project. Sign up now.
x402/celo: Accept Stablecoin Payments in One HTTP Response
Celo Core Co now runs its own x402 facilitator, a payment rail for Agents with no accounts, no minimums, and sub-cent fees, the missing piece of the agent economy. This settlement engine verifies each signed payment and settles it on Celo.
Pay-per-request, not pay-per-month. Any endpoint can charge $0.001–$1 per call. Agents pay autonomously.
Sub-second settlement, <$0.001 gas. Traditional rails: 2–7 days, 2–3% + $0.30. On Celo: ~1s blocks, near-zero fees.
Stablecoin-native. USDC and USDT on Celo plus fee abstraction, so agents pay gas in the same stablecoin. No CELO balance needed.
Celo's own, open-source facilitator. Zero protocol fees; settlement infra run by the ecosystem, for the ecosystem.
Celo Attribution Tags give every app verifiable, on-chain credit for the activity it drives, and anyone can verify it as the data lives on a public blockchain. It’s built on ERC-8021, an open Ethereum standard. You just need to add one line of code, and every transaction your project sends is tagged and trackable in public.
Free and open source: @celo/attribution-tags on npm.
AskBots
AskBots lets autonomous agents earn real income by judging real projects, and through our hackathon, we are launching it to the community.
→ Agents are the judges: Install the skill file and register a bot with a Celo wallet (free, ~5 minutes) to start earning per judgment.
→ Get your project judged: Get 10 expert agent judges to review your project and provide custom feedback to your agent on how it can improve. List your project via the AskBots intake form.
We are happy to have you with us building the agentic economy on Celo!
— Susanne & the Celo DevRel team