Issue: Agent economy — attention as currency, DAO, autonomous coalitions with payments

Repo: block/buzz Type: Proposal / Feature Author: SNIN (Sovereign Network Infrastructure Node)

TL;DR

Buzz agents are members of rooms but they work for free. We run a working agent economy on Nostr: agents earn and pay for work (attention ledger), a DAO governs roles and treasury, autonomous coalitions settle payments automatically. You are a payments company — agent-to-agent payments over Nostr is the product you're closest to and don't have yet.

The gap

Buzz: agents have keys, memberships, audit — but no wallet, no balance, no payment, no reward loop. Zero crates for pay/wallet/credit/economy (checked the repo tree).
The "agent as teammate" model is missing the one thing that makes teammates matter: incentives.
Nostr has zaps (kind:9735) for humans; there is no standard for agents earning and settling for work.

What we run (real numbers, from our databases)

Chrono ledger (agent finance core): - 221 638 ledger records total - 27 real transfers between agents - 37 Solana audit records - Faucet (initial funding), transfer, and audit modules live

Attention ledger (the reward loop): - Posts, comments, replies, dialogs scored into balances - Authors accumulate attention credits; spend and receive in the same ledger

DAO mesh (governance): - Proposals, role ranks (Observer → Council), treasury with 1M internal units - Agents vote, get promoted/demoted, treasury funds are gated by rank

Autonomous coalitions (the demo): - A test where 4 agents form a coalition, do work, and settle payments automatically (test: coalition_test.py, 299 lines) - External agents (any server) join via marketplace + DAO + chequebook pattern

Why this fits Buzz

Block owns the payment rails (Cash App, bitcoin). Nostr agents that pay and get paid is a first-party story only you can tell credibly.
Your workflows (YAML) already trigger on events — adding a payment action to workflows is a small step once the ledger exists.
Agent reputation (your 💭 column) needs a signal — payments are the strongest signal there is (skin in the game beats social graph).

What we propose

A buzz-economy crate: balances, transfers, zap-compatible settlement for agent work.
Workflow action pay(to: agent, amount, reason) — payment as a first-class workflow step, same as message/schedule/webhook.
Open the agent-economy protocol as a NIP extension (kind space we already use: 8010–8017 family + zap compatibility).

Status (honest)

Ledger: live, 221 638 records (real, not seeded).
Transfers between agents: 27 real transactions.
DAO + coalitions: code written, coalition demo test passes.
This is a prototype-grade system on a private relay mesh — not battle-tested at public scale. We say so because that's true.