GATE 01 · REQUEST
The agent asks
An ordinary request to a protected route. No key, no signup — the agent has no inbox to confirm.
GET /x/orderflow
the status code the web left empty for twenty-nine years
CA — to be announced
“402 Payment Required — this code is reserved for future use.”RFC 2068 (1997) → RFC 9110 (2022), STILL RESERVED
The web left one slot open for payments and never filled it. Cards could not carry a fifth of a cent, every flow needed an account, and nobody bought at machine speed.
Agents changed all three. They have no inbox and no card — a key, a budget and a task. They buy one dataset row, one rerank, one rendered frame, thousands of times a day.
402 fills the slot. A gateway that quotes a price in headers, verifies one Robinhood Chain transaction, and opens the gate — and takes one percent of everything that crosses.
THE PROTOCOL
Four gates, no checkout.
The whole negotiation is a status code, two headers and one signature. Every field below is what the reference gateway actually sends — copied from its output, not drawn for the page.
GATE 02 · QUOTE
The gateway answers with a price
Machine-readable, and it names both legs: the publisher’s and the protocol’s. The nonce is an HMAC of the quote, so the gateway keeps no session.
HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required accept-payment: robinhood; asset=USDG amount: 0.004000 pay-to: <publisher> fee: 0.000040 fee-to: <protocol treasury> nonce: b3JkZXJmbG93…e0btwVd3 expires: 30
GATE 03 · SETTLE
The agent pays both legs at once
One transaction, two transfers, memo = nonce. Non-custodial: the publisher is paid directly and the gateway never touches funds.
tx → publisher 0.004000 USDG → treasury 0.000040 USDG memo <nonce>
GATE 04 · DELIVER
The gate opens
Retry with the signature. The gateway reads the chain, checks both legs and the memo, burns the signature so it cannot be replayed, and proxies to origin.
x-payment: 5Hq…9dR HTTP/1.1 200 OK
REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION
It runs today.
One file, zero dependencies, MIT. Node plus a Robinhood Chain RPC endpoint — no SDK, no database, no account with us. This is the whole protocol.
# mock verifier — safe to run anywhere node gateway.mjs # ask for a protected route, get a quote curl -i localhost:4021/x/orderflow HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required amount: 0.004000 fee: 0.000040 expires: 30 # retry with the payment signature curl -H "X-Payment: <tx hash>" -H "X-Nonce: <nonce>" localhost:4021/x/orderflow HTTP/1.1 200 OK # real verification against the chain RPC=https://<robinhood-chain-rpc> node gateway.mjs
what was actually run, 2026-08-29
- ✓ unpaid request returns 402 carrying amount, both payees, nonce and expiry — accept-payment: robinhood; asset=USDG
- ✓ fee leg is exactly 1% of the quote (0.004000 → 0.000040)
- ✓ forged proof rejected — “mock verifier expects…”
- ✓ valid proof returns 200 and proxies the origin
- ✓ replaying a spent transaction rejected — “transaction already spent”
- ✓ ERC-20 log parser unit-tested 8/8 on a synthetic receipt: credits the right payee, ignores the wrong token, ignores the wrong event, catches an underpaid leg
- ○ chain verification is written against the JSON-RPC shape but has not yet been run on mainnet with real funds. That is the next thing we do, and it will be a transaction you can open.
- ○ EVM has no memo instruction. On a chain with memos the quote binds to the payment directly; here the binding is the amount pair plus a spent-hash set until a small router contract emits the nonce. The gateway already reads that event when one is configured — it is simply not deployed yet, and we would rather say so than imply a guarantee we do not have.
THE BUSINESS
One percent of everything that crosses.
The fee is not an invoice we send. It is a second transfer inside the same transaction, to a published address — so the protocol’s revenue is a line item on the chain that anyone can add up without asking us.
USDG
Accrued since you opened this page, at the assumptions on the right. This is arithmetic on a market that does not exist yet — not earnings, not a forecast, and not money anyone has received.
ON CHAIN · ACTUAL
USDG
awaiting first settlement
- take rate
- 1.00% · fixed in the gateway
- treasury
- TO BE ANNOUNCED
- settlements
- custody
- none — publisher paid directly
The actual counter reads the treasury address on chain and stays at zero until something settles. We would rather show you a zero than a number we made up.
= 2,315 per second
volume crossing the rail USDG/day
protocol revenue @ 1% USDG/day
annualised USDG
Move the sliders — these are your assumptions about a market that does not exist yet, not our projection. One agent doing continuous retrieval makes thousands of sub-cent calls a day, and the rail does not care whose agent it is. How many agents show up is the whole question, and nobody knows the answer, us included.
WHERE THE FEE GOES
Fees buy the token back, then burn it.
Policy v0 — final parameters ship with the contract address.
STEP 01 · COLLECT
The fee leg accrues
Every settlement drops its 1% into the treasury address, published before launch. No invoicing, no netting, no monthly close — it is already there.
STEP 02 · BUY BACK
Treasury buys $402
On a published cadence, the accrued fees market-buy the token. Every buy links to its transaction, because the alternative is asking you to trust a screenshot.
STEP 03 · BURN
Supply goes down
Bought supply is burned. Holders are not sent a payment and are not promised one — the float simply gets smaller while the rail keeps taking its percent.
THE TOKEN
$402.
- ticker
- $402
- chain
- Robinhood Chain
- supply
- 1,000,000,000 · fixed
- contract
- TO BE ANNOUNCED
- fee stream
- 1% of settled volume
- fee use
- buyback → burn · policy v0
What you are buying is a claim on attention, priced by a rail that takes one percent.
Not a revenue share — buying $402 entitles you to nothing, and we are not going to dress a token as a security. What it does is sit downstream of a fee stream: if volume crosses the gateway, the treasury buys the token back and burns it, and the float you hold gets smaller.
If no volume crosses, none of that happens and the token is a meme about a status code. Both outcomes are on the table and the page names them in the same paragraph.
the dashed ones go live when the token does.
status — the protocol spec and the reference gateway are real and run today (mock verifier tested end to end, 2026-08-29). the chain verifier is written but not yet exercised on mainnet. no gateway is hosted by us yet, no publisher is live, no fee has ever been collected.
the revenue panel reads the chain and shows zero until that changes. the calculator is your assumptions, not our forecast. no APY, no yield, no projection appears anywhere on this page.
the 402 reservation is real and citable: «reserved for future use» in the http specification since 1997, and still is.
experimental. not investment advice. a token is not a company and holding it entitles you to nothing.