aqueduct-mpp

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  System overview

Inspiration

Open-data sites are buckling under AI-crawler load and with it, the costs of serving data are sky-rocketing. Many of them are increasingly restricting access behind Cloudflare gates or other human-only access gates. I wanted a way for agents to be able to access data through micro-transactions and for there to be economic incentives to provide that data.

What it does

A data publisher uses Aqueduct (open-source, MIT), to turn a data file (parquet, CSV, or JSON) into a Tap in one command. Tap: a metered, agent-payable data feed. The publisher can set their own price and becomes economically incentivised to manage the open database. Agents discover it, query the database, and pay per row of the open database over MPP on Tempo.

How we built it

• DuckDB serves the data (parquet/CSV/JSON)
• MPP / mppx handles per-request payments over Tempo Moderato testnet
• hono is the local server (akash for production)
• zod validates the frozen Tap config Onboarding compiles a dataset (parquet/CSV/JSON) into a frozen, eval-gated config, and the runtime just executes that config. User's agents can access it via MCP server or Claude Skill.

Challenges we ran into

Claude Code with Opus 4.8 is extremely competent at accessing and dealing with public databases - this was our adversarial benchmark. Most large, and well-funded open databases are continuing to provide unrestricted access to agents, so it was a challenge to find gated, but open databases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think Aqueduct could be a real help for providers of open data that are most exposed under economic pressure by increased agent traffic. The project didn't begin with this intention, but I'm happy about the pivot to the long tail of providers, because they could benefit the most.

What we learned

MPP is highly suitable for serving data in this way, and I'm really excited to continue building with it.

What's next for aqueduct-mpp

• The onboarding of publishers should be turned into a simple UI flow, and ultimately there needs to be a registry or directory of Taps that can be accessed.
• The MCP server and Claude Skill have to be discoverable and gain traction.
• Explore use cases for mpp streaming payments for streaming public data
• What really excites me is that this project creates economic incentives for database publishers to maintain their open databases and serve them better than the competition. Agents will inevitably seek the path of least resistance and cost.

Built With

• akash
• claude
• doaj
• duckdb
• hono
• mpp
• mppx
• node.js