Storytime Guardian

We gave a capybara pocket money and a curfew — and it bought my kid a bedtime story

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🦫 Storytime Guardian

We gave a capybara pocket money and a curfew — and it bought my kid a bedtime story. 🌙

▶ Live on Akash right now: http://1226bg26mpav3den718imk7kb8.ingress.cpu.dal.aes.akash.pub/

Hand Cappy the capybara a child's crayon drawing. Cappy can't see, can't draw, can't speak, and can't translate — so it goes to an open marketplace and buys each of those powers, paying per call, to turn the scribble into an illustrated, narrated, translated bedtime story. Watching over every purchase is The Guardian: a zero-trust policy plane that decides what Cappy is allowed to buy — blocking untrusted vendors and capping the nightly allowance.

The one-liner: agents are getting wallets. Storytime Guardian is the parent. 💛

🛍️ Zero.xyz — Best Use of Zero.xyz

Zero's whole thesis — agents discover and pay for capabilities on demand — is the engine of our app, not a garnish. Cappy literally cannot function without the marketplace: it has no vision, no image generation, no voice, no translation. For each gap it runs Zero's exact search → inspect → pay → deliver loop and gets a real result.

This isn't simulated. The four illustrations in our storybook were really generated and paid for on Zero — you're looking at the receipts:

  • ✅ Requirement 1 — installed into a coding agent via the CLI (@zeroxyz/cli, skill + session hooks)
  • ✅ Requirement 2 — $5 claimed to a managed wallet (5 USDC)
  • ✅ Requirement 3 — real paid runs, money deducted, results delivered:
    • runId run_k5iA8QZ94ihg1opwFu90z · 0.003 USDC on mpp / tempo · txHash 0xe574…88921
    • 4 FLUX images purchased across x402 and MPP rails · ~$0.035 total spent · every call has a runId

Why we stand out: most teams will describe an agent that could buy things. Ours actually spends real USDC on Zero in the live demo, and the money it spends becomes the art on screen. The capability layer is even installed in an isolated, reproducible environment so the whole Zero setup is clean and repeatable. Zero isn't a feature here — it's the reason Cappy can do anything at all.

🛡️ Pomerium — Most Innovative Use of Pomerium

For a decade, zero-trust has guarded apps, APIs, and infrastructure — access for humans. We point Pomerium at something brand new: an autonomous agent's wallet.

The moment an agent can discover and pay for tools on its own (see Zero, above), the access-control question flips. It's no longer "which apps can this user reach?" — it's "which vendors is this agent allowed to pay, and how much?" That is exactly Pomerium's model — identity + context + policy — applied to a surface it's never been applied to before: agent commerce.

In Storytime Guardian, The Guardian is Pomerium's policy plane, running on Pomerium Zero's managed control plane:

  • Every capability purchase carries the agent's identity.
  • A trusted-vendor allowlist governs what Cappy may buy — the real version of the policy Pomerium enforces on routes.
  • When Cappy reaches for an untrusted vendor, it is DENIED — live, full-screen — and the agent recovers with a vendor we trust. Every decision is audited.

Why this deserves "most innovative": it takes Pomerium's core idea — no implicit trust, verify identity and context on every request — and extends it from human → app to agent → vendor spending, the governance layer enterprises will demand before they ever let an agent transact. Same Pomerium principles, a frontier no one else is guarding.

🔗 Nexla — Best Use Case of Nexla

An agent that spends money needs governed memory — and that's a data-integration problem, which is Nexla's home turf.

Every night Cappy produces a story and a full economic trail: what it made, which vendors it paid, how much, on which rail, and what policy blocked. Storytime Guardian uses Nexla as the family library — the place that trail becomes a Nexset: a structured, queryable record that joins the creative output to its spend-and-audit metadata. Authenticated to the Nexla API, it turns ephemeral, one-off agent actions into durable, governed data a family can browse and an operations team can audit.

Why it's a strong use case: this is the missing back-office for autonomous agents. As agents act and spend, someone has to make that activity integrable and auditable — exactly what Nexla exists to do. We're not moving rows for a dashboard; we're making an AI agent's behavior into governed enterprise data.

☁️ Akash — Best Use of Akash

A self-directed agent that earns, spends, and runs itself belongs on decentralized compute — not a hyperscaler that can switch it off.

Storytime Guardian is deployed and live on Akash right now — the entire app (agent + Guardian + UI) as a single self-contained service, reachable at a public URL:

▶ http://1226bg26mpav3den718imk7kb8.ingress.cpu.dal.aes.akash.pub/

  • One deploy.sdl.yaml, one lease, one public endpoint — infra/akash/.
  • Self-contained by design: it reaches nothing external at runtime, so the live demo can't break on venue wifi.

Why it fits Akash: the pitch and the platform rhyme — an autonomous, self-funding agent, running on permissionless, decentralized infrastructure. It's not a screenshot; click the link.

✨ The 90-second demo

  1. 🖍️ A crayon drawing appears — Cappy can't see it, so it buys vision on Zero.
  2. 📖 It writes the story free (its own imagination), then buys illustrations — the book paints in with real purchased art.
  3. 🛡️ It reaches for the cheapest narration voice… the Guardian blocks it (untrusted vendor). Full-screen DENIED. It recovers with a trusted vendor.
  4. 🌏 It buys a translation so grandma can listen in her language.
  5. 🌙 The storybook reads itself aloud, and the Bedtime Receipt shows every call, every dollar, and the one purchase policy stopped.

🚀 Run it locally

pnpm install && pnpm dev

🦫 UI → http://localhost:3100 (press “Tuck me in ▶”; add ?auto=1 for kiosk mode) · ⚙️ Gateway → http://localhost:8787

🧩 Architecture

apps/warden-gateway  →  agent orchestrator + capability market + Guardian + spend meter (SSE)
apps/storybook       →  Next.js 16 capybara UI (cozy onsen-night theme)
infra/{zero-sandbox, pomerium, nexla, akash}  →  the sponsor integrations

Built with 🧡 and an unreasonable number of capybaras.

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