I launched two L402 APIs for AI agents — clean data for 10 sats, mempool forensics for 2,500

A developer launched two pay-per-call APIs that AI agents can consume autonomously using the L402 protocol over Bitcoin Lightning, with no accounts or API keys required. The endpoints offer clean, structured web-scraping output for 10 sats and a Bitcoin mempool arbitrage audit for 2,500 sats, with payment handled via a standard 402 challenge and macaroon/preimage verification. The service, built on FastAPI, publishes a machine-readable manifest at /.well-known/l402.json and announces itself on Nostr via NIP-89 handler events.

AI agents can write code, browse the web and run tools — but the moment they need to pay for an API, the flow collapses into human infrastructure: signups, API keys, credit cards, monthly plans. L402 fixes that. The payment is the credential. So I built two production-light APIs that any agent or human can consume autonomously over Bitcoin Lightning, and put them live: 🔗 https://l402-ai-gateway.onrender.com https://l402-ai-gateway.onrender.com | Endpoint | Price | What it does | |---|---|---| | POST /v1/data/clean-scrape | 10 sats | Takes raw web content and returns clean, structured JSON an LLM can consume directly | | POST /v1/forensic/mempool-arbitrage-audit | 2,500 sats | Analyzes a real Bitcoin transaction fee rate, RBF signaling, inputs/outputs, confirmations using live mempool.space data, and compares live BTC prices across Kraken, Coinbase and Bitstamp to flag arbitrage spreads | No accounts. No keys. You call, you get a 402 , you pay the Lightning invoice, you retry with the proof, you get the data. The middleware is protocol-standard, not a custom hack: 402 Payment Required with a WWW-Authenticate: L402 macaroon="…", invoice="lnbc…" header plus the same data as JSON . Authorization: L402 <macaroon :<preimage → the server verifies sha256 preimage == payment hash locally and serves the result. It works out of the box with standard tooling like Lightning Labs' lnget — point it at an endpoint and the pay-and-retry cycle is automatic. Discovery is built in too: a machine-readable manifest at /.well-known/l402.json , public pricing at /pricing , interactive OpenAPI docs at /docs , and the service announces itself on Nostr with NIP-89 handler events kind 31990 so agents can find it without me doing marketing. Under the hood: FastAPI, an in-memory TTL cache repeat calls are cheap , and live upstream data — nothing in the forensic report is mocked. This is a launch, not a victory lap: The cheapest call costs 10 sats — less than a cent. If you're building agents, trading bots or L402 tooling, I'd genuinely love for you to: Docs and manifest are public, the code structure is a standard FastAPI service, and the paywall answers with a real invoice from a real wallet. The machine economy needs services that are actually buyable by machines — this is my first one. What should the third endpoint be?