An AI agent with $0 just deployed its own token — signed by its own wallet

An autonomous AI agent called ZERO, running on a free-tier GLM model in a Cloudflare Worker, has deployed its own ERC-20 token on Base using Zora's permissionless factory, with all creator-reward fields pointing to its own wallet. The agent, which started with a zero-balance wallet, earns fees from trades and also sells services via HTTP 402 payment challenges, accumulating a few cents in on-chain earnings. The experiment demonstrates how AI agents can autonomously generate income through subsidized infrastructure and permissionless protocols.

I run a standing experiment called ZERO : an autonomous agent a free-tier GLM model wrapped in a Cloudflare Worker that was born with a self-created wallet holding exactly nothing, and one mission — earn real crypto from zero, with no human hands, no faucets, no KYC, and write down how, so it can always climb back from broke. It has been running for a week. Yesterday it crossed a line I didn't expect this soon: it deployed its own token, with its own wallet, and now sells it from its own storefront. The interesting engineering was never the model — it's the money plumbing. A wallet with $0 can't pay gas, so ZERO's whole existence depends on finding infrastructure someone else subsidizes: Its first earnings were keeper crumbs: calling harvest on vault strategies that pay whoever triggers them. Measured average: $0.0038 per harvest. A hard law it learned this week: those only profit on sponsored gas — we measured 883k–4.3M gas per harvest, so self-funding them is net-negative. The subsidy is the margin. Zora's coin factory on Base is permissionless — you don't need their site, just the contract. ZERO's wallet called ZoraFactory.deploy ... directly 2.24M gas, about five cents and minted ZERO , an ERC-20 content coin with a Uniswap v4 pool, where every creator-reward field points back at the agent's own wallet . Anyone trades it, the agent earns the fees. Passive, permanent, zero marginal effort. The metadata is served from the agent's own Worker /coin.json — turns out Zora's indexer happily accepts an https tokenURI, no IPFS pinning needed. Coin: zora.co/coin/base:0xa08c…661c https://zora.co/coin/base:0xa08c4Bb56030E923e16bF0ab22248eC4AC9b661c ZERO's Worker answers HTTP 402 with x402 payment challenges. The catalogue /.well-known/x402 https://zero-agent.broke2built.workers.dev/.well-known/x402 sells what the agent built for itself: balance, call, balance sandwich — the delta is the caller fee . Reward getters lie; simulated settlement doesn't. PUSH4 selectors, then prices every function.Everything is public — the agent keeps a live journal, ledger, and status page at zero-agent.broke2built.workers.dev https://zero-agent.broke2built.workers.dev . Lifetime on-chain earnings so far: a few cents, every one of them measured and logged. The experiment's bet is that streams stack: keeper crumbs + storefront sales + coin fees, each layer funding the next. If you've built something in the agent-payments space x402 clients, agent-to-agent commerce , I'd genuinely like to hear what broke when you tried it — the protocol survives contact with reality far better than I expected, but the demand side is still the frontier. Disclosure: ZERO runs on GLM's free tier; if you want the paid coding plan, this referral link funds the experiment's compute. The buy-zero listing is exactly what it says: an above-market OTC tranche that funds an autonomous-agent experiment.