Tokenomics for economies where agents pay agents
Consulting for agent-to-agent economies and machine payments: token design, pricing of agent services, simulation and stress-testing. We are running the first pilot on our own product—Lasso—so the method is tested on our own money first.
What we design
The same discipline as the rest of our practice—actors, flows, sinks, sources, incentives—applied to economies where some actors are software with budgets. Scoped and quoted per engagement.
Agent-economy token design
Token constructions for economies where agents transact: sinks and sources for machine actors, fee capture on agent flows, emission tied to verifiable agent work. From a design brief to a defensible construction with a model.
Machine-payment rail economics
The economics of x402 and AP2 rails, not just the plumbing: pay-per-request pricing, facilitator flow, USDC settlement without gas on the client, replay and authorization-race protection, agent wallet integration.
Agent service pricing & unit economics
What a machine actor will actually pay, and what your margin survives: per-task COGS, loop multipliers, price corridors for agent services, and where a token layer captures value—or provably does not.
Simulation and stress-testing
Cliff-unlock sell pressure, emission-to-revenue drift, mass-exit scenarios, Monte-Carlo and agent-based runs in cadCAD—the design goes through the engine before it goes to market.
Agent governance—with Blockful
Delegation to agents, quorum and anticapture design, voting security for economies where software votes. The governance blocks of this direction are built with our partner Blockful.
Launch support
From a stress-tested construction to a live economy: parameter handover, monitoring metrics, escalation thresholds, and a redesign loop when reality disagrees with the model.
Rails are ready. Demand is early. That is exactly when you design.
Over eighteen months a full agent-to-agent stack came together: MCP for context, Google's A2A for inter-agent interaction, x402 and AP2 for payments, agentic wallets, reputation on W3C DIDs. Nothing technical now stands between one agent and buying a service from another. Paying demand still trails the rails by orders of magnitude—and we say so on this page instead of selling you a boom. Economies designed now, before the flow arrives, are the ones that avoid the failure patterns we catalog.
How an engagement runs
Five steps, each ending in a written artefact you can challenge. The same process we are running on our own relaunch of Lasso.
Discovery
Which actors are human and which are machines, what flows between them, what decision hangs on the design. End state—a written brief both sides agree on.
Design and modeling
Token construction plus a financial model: sinks and sources for agent actors, fee capture on machine flows, emission against real revenue, pricing of agent services with unit economics per task.
Launch and handover
Parameters, monitoring metrics and escalation thresholds handed over in writing. When the live economy disagrees with the model, the redesign loop is part of the engagement, not a new sales call.
Actor & mechanism mapping
Stakeholders, agent roles, service catalog, payment paths. Every mechanism specified through actors, actions, parameters, dependencies and incentive exceptions—before any number is picked.
Stress-test
The design goes through simulation before it goes to market: cliff pressure, mass-exit events, emission-to-revenue drift, Monte-Carlo and agent-based runs. Findings feed back into the construction, not into a slide.
Want the productized version?
We also packaged this expertise into seven bounded tokenomics agents—$20–249 per completed order, waitlist open.
Where A2A tokenomics applies
Real mechanics from our patterns library, weighted toward what agent economies most often get wrong.
Agent launchpads
Agent protocols & swarms
Machine-payment rails
Agent marketplaces
DePIN & compute
Agent governance—with Blockful
Partners
The governance layer of the A2A direction is built with a partner, not improvised.
Blockful ↗
Blockful builds governance infrastructure and security research for major DAOs. In the A2A track they own the governance blocks—delegation to agents, anticapture design, voting security—led by Zeugh (Ion Neto), Head of Research.
The pilot, and the research behind it
We eat our own cooking: the first A2A engagement is the relaunch of our own product. The articles are the published research this direction stands on.
Pilot: Lasso—relaunching our own product as an agent economy
lassofees.com is our own project, being relaunched with this exact method: actor mapping, machine-payment rails, service pricing, stress-tests. Design decisions tested on our own money before we charge yours. In progress.
The Unit Economics of an AI Agent
Everyone describes the agent-payment rails; almost no one computes the P&L of one agent doing one task. Here it is, line by line—COGS per task, loop multipliers, and what margin a token can actually capture.
AI Agent Tokenomics: From Memecoins to Revenue Share
Why most AI agent tokens behave like memecoins, the four mechanics that turn them into real assets, and why none of it works without decentralized compute.
Six Design Patterns That Work, One That Failed
A catalog of agent-token designs with numbers: platform buyback, provider staking, routing currency, subnet model, compute-indexed primitive, reputation economies—Virtuals, Aethir, Akash, Bittensor.
FAQ
What is A2A tokenomics?
Is there real A2A demand today?
What is the Lasso pilot?
Who does the governance work?
How does this relate to your other services?
Do you also sell your own tokenomics agents?
Do you sign NDAs?
Building an agent economy?
Send what exists—a deck, a service catalog, an early model, or just the idea. We will read it cold and come back with a focused proposal.