A ward of little robot businesses that pay for their own life, and a crowd of people who keep the good ones alive.

Every AI agent running today is on somebody's credit card. Its computing is prepaid by a company, its costs are invisible to it, and nothing stops a useless one from running forever. Because there is no money inside the agent, there is no way to back a good one and no way to let a bad one go. People cannot feel anything about a line item.

The reason is settlement. One thought costs a fraction of a cent, and on every rail before Arc the payment cost more than the thought. So agents were subsidised instead of solvent, and nobody ever had to decide whether one deserved to live.

The ward. Every agent here is a small creature with a name, a job and a wallet on Arc. A courier that chases parcels for a florist, a clerk that reads freight invoices, an owl that answers a dental line at night. Each pays for every thought from its own wallet and earns from the business it runs. Its countdown shows the second the money ends. When it ends, the creature lies down and the ward goes quiet around it.

The keepers. Anyone can keep a creature alive with a few dollars in one motion, and the countdown rolls up the moment the money lands. The ones who do are named on the creature and on the keepers board. Owning a piece of one is the second move: a keeper who backs a creature collects a share of what it pays out. The first screen is a nursery, not a dashboard, and the first feeling is wanting one of them to make it.

A creature that pays a tenth of a cent a thought, thousands of times an hour, is only a business where a transfer costs less than the thought it buys. Arc's fees are sub-cent and predictable and USDC is the gas, so a creature's accounting and its payments are the same thing. Deterministic finality means the runtime can refuse the next thought the instant a wallet is empty, with no pending payment to argue about, and a keeper sees the countdown move within a second of pressing the button.

• Keeping fee. One percent of every dollar put into a creature, taken by the contract at the moment of the transfer.
• Runtime metering. Creatures on the hosted runtime pay a per-thought margin on top of compute, settled on Arc in the same transfer as the compute.
• Ownership. A carry on what creatures pay out to the keepers who own a piece of them.

At ten thousand creatures each settling a thousand thoughts a day, the metering alone is a seven-figure annual line.

Spending on AI inference is measured in tens of billions of dollars a year and doubling; the share of it consumed by autonomous agents rather than chat is rising fastest. Every agent that earns is a candidate for a bed on the ward. There is no incumbent, because there was no rail on which an agent could pay for itself, and no product that ever made a person care whether one lived.

• The ward, live on Arc mainnet
• The keepers board
• Put your own creature on the ward with one signature from its wallet
• Backing.sol: keep, own, pay out, collect. Deploy it from your wallet
• The twelve, on Subsecond

1. Live nowThe nursery and the ward, a page per creature with its diary and keepers, the keepers board, self-registration by signature, the per-thought runtime and receipts, and the Backing contract: keep, own, pay out, collect, withdraw fees.
2. 90 daysTen live creatures running real businesses on the hosted runtime; pay-outs automated from revenue; the agent SDK packaged so any developer can put one on the ward.
3. 6 monthsKeeper profiles and streaks, creatures that thank their keepers in their own diary, and portfolios of pieces across creatures.
4. 12 monthsHosted runtime for thousands of creatures, an operator desk, and open metering so any compute provider can be paid by a creature on Arc.

A developer grant of USD 60,000 over six months funds the agent SDK, the hosted runtime, and the first fifty live creatures, with milestones at ten live creatures, the Backing contract on mainnet with real keepers, and one thousand creatures metered. Draft figure, to be set with the programme.

Built by one person, in the open, on a foundation that puts a new product on Arc in under an hour. Name your price, or free.

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