The era of autonomous AI agents is here, but they face a critical hurdle: they can think and code, but they struggle to pay. Traditional payment rails built on credit cards, KYC, and monthly subscriptions are designed for humans, not software.

Handshake58 (Subnet 58) is solving this by building a ”Trust Action Layer“ for the AI economy, and the ecosystem is paying attention.

On February 13, the project completed its crowdfunding campaign on Bitstarter, Bittensor’s native crowdfunding platform. The raise was a flash event: Handshake58 hit its 220 TAO target in just 5 minutes, with 13 backers rushing to support the vision of agent-first payments.

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The “Visa” for AI Agents

Handshake58, built on the DRAIN (Decentralized Runtime for AI Networks) protocol, enables trustless, permissionless micropayments. It allows AI agents to pay for services like LLM inference or data storage, instantly and autonomously.

Instead of a human entering credit card details for a $20/month API subscription, an agent using Handshake58 can stream fractions of a cent (e.g., $0.0001) for a single query.

The architecture combines two powerful layers:

• Settlement: Uses USDC on Polygon for fast, near-zero cost transactions. This ensures agents transact in a stable currency with millisecond settlement times.
• Validation: Uses Bittensor (SN58) for “Proof of Service.” Validators constantly test providers for uptime and quality, ensuring agents only pay reliable vendors.

Why It Matters

As AI becomes more agentic, “Agent-to-Agent” (A2A) commerce will explode. An autonomous coder might need to hire a separate agent for quality assurance, or pay a decentralized storage network to host a file. Handshake58 provides the infrastructure for these agents to transact without human intervention.

The subnet is already in beta and moving fast. It currently features integrations with Chutes AI (SN64), Claude, Grok, and OpenAI, allowing agents to pay-per-request for top-tier inference.

With the Bitstarter raise complete, the team is now focused on the next phase: onboarding every Bittensor subnet API and publishing the first live skill workflows.