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DEMO VIDEO: https://www.loom.com/share/0f24ba256054436fb4bcea568d04f533

Inspiration

A guy once traded a red paperclip up to a house. We wanted to know what an AI could do with $5. Agents can't get credit cards, but with Zero.xyz they can pay for things online with crypto. And since this hackathon's prize is an Amazon gift card, we thought it would be funny if our agent ended the demo by buying one itself.

What it does

We hand an AI agent $5 of real money and it goes shopping in a marketplace built for machines. It buys data, makes a product, opens a shop, and finishes by buying a real Amazon gift card. You watch everything on a live dashboard: its balance, its thoughts, its receipts. The brain is Claude making every decision live. There is no script. In one practice run it invented a pet portrait pack called Royal Pets and priced it at $6.99.

How we built it

A Python agent built on the Claude Agent SDK. The AI gets five tools: search, inspect, buy, review, narrate. The spending rules live in code, so the AI can decide but can never overspend. Zero.xyz is how it finds and pays services. Every event it produces streams into a Nexla data pipeline. The dashboard runs in a Docker container on Akash and is live for anyone to open. All the pieces talk through one simple event log file.

Challenges we ran into

The cheapest gift card in the marketplace costs $5.24 and our agent has $5.00. It could not afford its own ending. That became the whole story: it has to shop smarter to get there. We also had to protect the $5 from our own agent, so we wrote the money guards before anything else. Best one: we planted a broken vendor to show off error recovery, and the AI just avoided it because it checked the ratings first.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A real funded wallet with no card or bank behind it. A real map of the machine economy, including 22 gift card services. An AI that truly decides everything live, so no two runs look the same. Three sponsor tools each doing an actual job. And a demo where nothing is faked, which we think is the whole point.

What we learned

The machine economy is real. It has search, prices, receipts and reviews, and most things cost less than a cent. Paying over HTTP 402 is smoother than any checkout we've ever built. And a tight budget made the demo better, not worse.