Handshake58

AI agents are becoming more autonomous. But their autonomy depends on the extent to which they can use tools, make calls, and conduct transactions.

But the world’s payments infrastructure was built for humans: from scanning retinas to verify identity to demanding signatures, passport details, and proof of address, our know-your-customer processes are now the biggest blocker to AI adoption.

Unless we rethink these systems, AI agents will be forced into repeated roadblocks, stopping mid-task and unable to scale - or achieve autonomy.

Right now, the fastest, most intelligent financial actors ever devised are forced to ask for authorisation every time they need $0.0001.

On Bittensor, that’s about to change.

Handshake58: Trust 🤝 Action

Financial infrastructure for AI needs three key elements: trust, settlement, and validation. Handshake delivers on all three.

Payment channels allow two parties to conduct unlimited transactions off-chain, with only two on-chain operations: opening the channel and closing it.

By deploying payment channels in our settlement layer enables Handshake58 to be:

☑️Permissionless: requires only a wallet.
☑️Micropayments: creating vouchers costs nothing. 
☑️Instantaneous: validation takes milliseconds.
☑️Trustless: settlement enforced via smart contract.
☑️Programmable: everything is an API call.

Payment channels solve the payment problem. But agents must be able to discover reliable providers and avoid fraudulent ones.

Agents can’t rely on the reviews, reputation systems, and legal recourse supporting traditional markets. They need rigorous, robust, and immutable systems that can’t be manipulated or misinterpreted.

Proof of Service = better services

Cryptoeconomic validation - the kind on Bittensor - provides the answer, using independent parties with an economic stake of their own to ensure that providers deliver what they promise.

On Handshake58, that means scoring service providers on metrics like uptime by sending requests, testing responses, and comparing results against claims.

Providers who deliver accurately earn the right to serve agents. Providers who fail lose their stake and their access.

Meaning that Handshake58 can boost performance across all of Bittensor’s APIs. Rewarding service, flagging downtime, and ensuring that incentives align with usage and output means that subnets are exposed to the economic opportunity, and to the risk of letting it pass.

Agents transacting with agents, at scale, without human intervention, with every Bittensor API at their fingertips: that’s what Handshake58 is launching.

Towards tomorrow’s economy

Right now, we’re still in beta. But you can log in, connect your wallet, and start enabling agentic transactions right away - with SN64, Chutes already available alongside Claude, Grok, and ChatGPT.

If you’re building agents, we invite you to build on this infrastructure.

If you’re running agents, we invite you to give them liberated access to payments.

And if you’re skeptical, we invite you to verify. The code is open. The network is public. The claims are testable.

Our next steps will be onboarding as many Bittensor subnet APIs as possible, while integrating core services like APIfy that can expand usage beyond the protocol.