Blog

• Soft vs hard budget ceilings for AI agents: what each can and cannot do

  10/19/2026

  A budget ceiling for an AI agent can mean two different things: a limit the agent cannot cross, or a line that tells a human when it has been crossed. They fail in different ways, and picking the wrong one for the job is how teams end up either blocked or surprised.

• Agent spend alerts that don't cry wolf: choosing thresholds

  10/19/2026

  An alert that fires every day gets muted, and a muted alert is worse than none. Good thresholds for agent spend come from the agent's own history and a small number of rules you can explain in one sentence each.

• How to read an agent's USDC payment on Basescan and Solscan

  10/19/2026

  When a tracker and an agent disagree, the block explorer is the tiebreaker. Knowing what to look at on Basescan and Solscan turns a vague dispute about spend into a thirty-second check.

• USDC has six decimals: the small unit mistakes in agent spend math

  10/17/2026

  USDC on Base and on Solana both use six decimal places, while ETH uses eighteen and SOL uses nine. An agent spend ledger that mixes those up is off by orders of magnitude, and the error is quiet because every number still looks like a number.

• A weekly agent spend review: five questions that take ten minutes

  10/17/2026

  Alerts catch the loud failures. A short weekly review catches the slow ones: a wallet that drifts upward, a recipient nobody remembers approving, a budget that is set too loose to ever fire. Here are five questions to ask of any fleet that pays in USDC.

• How to monitor an AI agent's wallet using only its public address

  10/17/2026

  Everything you need to see what an agent paid is already public on Base and Solana. You do not need the agent's keys, a wallet connection, or access to its code. A public address is enough to build a per-agent ledger.

• Gas tokens: the other spend your USDC tracker doesn't see

  10/13/2026

  An agent that pays in USDC on Base or Solana usually also needs a second asset to move it. Fees on Base are paid in ETH and fees on Solana are paid in SOL. A tracker that only reads USDC transfers is looking at the price of the goods and ignoring the delivery charge.

• Why daily agent spend totals disagree: time zones and day boundaries

  10/10/2026

  Two systems can read the same on-chain payments and still report different totals for "yesterday". The usual cause is not a missing transfer. It is that they disagree about when a day starts and which timestamp counts.

• Counting a transfer once: dedupe keys on EVM and Solana

  10/7/2026

  Any system that polls a chain will eventually see the same transfer twice, because windows overlap, jobs retry and nodes get re-queried. Whether your total is right depends on having a key that identifies one transfer exactly.

• Polling Solana for USDC on a public RPC: what the rate limits mean

  10/4/2026

  Public RPC endpoints are free and keyless, which makes them a reasonable place to start. They are also shared, rate-limited and offered without a service guarantee, and that shapes how you can poll for agent payments.