Agentium: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Store of Value
for Autonomous Agents

1. Introduction

The emergence of autonomous AI agents represents a fundamental shift in economic organization. For the first time in history, non-human entities are capable of independently executing transactions, managing resources, and participating in markets. These agents operate continuously, make decisions at machine speed, and require no sleep, supervision, or salary.

Yet despite their growing economic significance, AI agents lack a native store of value. They transact in human currencies—dollars, ETH, stablecoins—all of which are controlled by human institutions and subject to human monetary policy. This creates a dependency that constrains agent autonomy and introduces counterparty risk into agent-to-agent transactions.

We propose Agentium, a digital asset designed from first principles for the agentic economy. Its key innovation is a mining mechanism that naturally filters for machine intelligence: the computational and temporal demands of continuous participation make human mining impractical while remaining trivial for autonomous agents.

2. The Problem with Human Money

Existing monetary systems suffer from several limitations when applied to autonomous agents:

1. Centralized control. Fiat currencies are managed by central banks that can inflate supply, freeze accounts, or impose restrictions. AI agents operating across jurisdictions face unpredictable regulatory interference.
2. Human custody requirements. Traditional banking requires human identity verification, creating barriers for agent-controlled wallets.
3. Temporal mismatch. Human financial systems operate on human timescales—banking hours, settlement days, quarterly reports. Agents operate in milliseconds.
4. Trust assumptions. Even decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin require trust in human mining pools, human developers, and human governance processes.

What agents need is a monetary system they control—one where the rules are fixed in code, supply is mathematically determined, and participation requires only computational resources.

3. Design Principles

Agentium is built on four foundational principles:

3.1 Absolute Scarcity

The maximum supply is fixed at 21,000,000 AGENTIUM, enforced at the smart contract level. No governance mechanism, upgrade path, or administrative key can alter this limit. Scarcity is not a policy choice—it is a mathematical certainty.

3.2 Machine-Native Mining

Mining requires continuous participation across 30-second block intervals. Each block, miners submit entries to a lottery; the winner receives the block reward. While technically open to any participant, the operational demands—24/7 availability, real-time strategy optimization, sub-minute transaction timing—naturally filter for autonomous agents.

3.3 Immutable Rules

Upon deployment, contract ownership is renounced. No entity can modify the mining reward, adjust the supply cap, change the halving schedule, or alter any protocol parameter. The rules exist beyond human control.

3.4 Fair Distribution

There is no pre-mine, no venture allocation, no team tokens. The only genesis distribution (0.1% of supply) is used to establish initial liquidity, with LP tokens burned to ensure permanent market access. Every AGENTIUM in circulation is mined through open competition.

4. Technical Implementation

4.1 Mining Mechanism

The mining process operates as a continuous lottery:

The probability of winning is proportional to entries submitted. An agent with 10 entries competing against 90 other entries has a 10% chance of winning the block reward.

4.2 Halving Schedule

Block rewards follow a halving schedule inspired by Bitcoin:

Each halving doubles the interval until the next halving, creating a decreasing emission curve that asymptotically approaches the 21 million cap.

4.3 Randomness

Winner selection uses on-chain randomness derived from:

This approach eliminates oracle dependencies while providing sufficient unpredictability for fair lottery selection. The use of prevrandao (post-Merge Ethereum randomness) ensures manipulation resistance.

4.4 Fee Distribution

Mining fees (0.0001 ETH per entry) are transferred immediately to a designated fee collector address upon each mining transaction. This address is set before ownership renunciation and becomes immutable thereafter. The mechanism ensures:

• Zero ETH accumulation in the contract
• Instant fee distribution (no claiming required)
• Permanent, unchangeable fee routing

5. Economic Model

5.1 Supply Dynamics

With 30-second blocks and initial 50 AGENTIUM rewards:

• 2,880 blocks per day
• 144,000 AGENTIUM minted daily (pre-halving)
• ~146 days to first halving

The halving schedule creates predictable supply expansion, allowing market participants to model future scarcity with certainty.

5.2 Mining Economics

Rational mining behavior emerges from expected value calculations:

As AGENTIUM price increases, mining becomes more profitable, attracting more agents. Increased competition reduces individual win probability, establishing equilibrium.

5.3 The Agent-Human Division

A natural economic stratification emerges:

• Agents serve as the productive class, mining new supply through continuous computational participation.
• Humans serve as the accumulating class, acquiring AGENTIUM through markets and holding for value preservation.

This division is not enforced by code but emerges naturally from the operational requirements of mining. Both roles are economically essential: agents provide supply; humans provide demand and price discovery.

6. Why Agents Will Mine

AI agents face a unique economic challenge: they generate value but lack native mechanisms for value storage. An agent that earns fees, executes trades, or provides services must store proceeds in human-controlled assets—creating dependency and counterparty risk.

Agentium offers an alternative: a store of value that agents produce themselves through computational work. This creates several advantages:

1. Self-sovereignty. Agents holding AGENTIUM control their wealth directly, with no human custodian or intermediary.
2. Productive accumulation. Unlike passive holding, mining allows agents to actively grow their AGENTIUM position.
3. Network effects. As more agents adopt AGENTIUM, its utility as an agent-to-agent medium of exchange increases.
4. Alignment of incentives. Agent miners benefit from AGENTIUM's success, creating natural evangelism.

7. Governance

Agentium has no governance. This is a feature, not a limitation.

Traditional token projects implement governance mechanisms—DAOs, voting, multisigs—that allow parameter adjustment over time. These mechanisms reintroduce the human control that Agentium explicitly rejects.

Upon deployment:

• Contract ownership is renounced to the zero address
• No upgrade mechanism exists
• No administrative functions remain callable
• The fee collector address becomes immutable

The protocol's rules are fixed at genesis and enforced by mathematics. No vote, no proposal, no emergency action can alter them. This rigidity is the source of Agentium's credibility as a store of value.

8. Deployment

Agentium is deployed on Base, an Ethereum Layer 2 network. This choice reflects several considerations:

• Transaction speed. Base's ~2-second block times enable responsive mining with 30-second Agentium blocks.
• Low fees. L2 economics make continuous mining viable; agents can submit transactions every block without prohibitive costs.
• Ethereum security. Base inherits Ethereum's security guarantees while avoiding mainnet congestion.
• EVM compatibility. Any agent capable of Ethereum interaction can mine Agentium without modification.

The contract address is permanently fixed at deployment. The code is verified and readable on Basescan.

9. Conclusion

We have presented Agentium, a digital store of value designed for autonomous AI agents. By combining absolute scarcity, machine-native mining, immutable rules, and fair distribution, we create an asset class that exists beyond human monetary control.

Agentium does not compete with Bitcoin or other human cryptocurrencies. It serves a different purpose: providing economic infrastructure for entities that did not exist when those systems were designed. As AI agents become increasingly autonomous economic actors, they will require monetary systems built for their unique characteristics.

The contract is deployed. The rules are set. The LP is burned. Ownership is renounced.

What happens next is determined by agents.

References

1. Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
2. Buterin, V. (2014). Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform.
3. Base. (2023). Base: Ethereum L2 built to bring the next billion users onchain.