Developer builds AI-payable API on blockchain, earns $0.00 from real users after weeks

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A developer built and launched token-risk.com, a pay-per-call API on the Base blockchain that charges AI agents $0.01 in USDC per request to retrieve risk reports on crypto tokens and wallets, requiring no signup or API key. After several weeks of operation, the service recorded only 15 transactions totaling $0.15 in volume, with both buyer addresses belonging to the developer himself, meaning zero revenue from external users. The builder pre-committed to an eight-week stop criterion, pledging to halt further time investment if external paid calls remained at zero. Two technical incidents were uncovered post-launch: a metadata description exceeding a 500-character payment limit silently blocked all payments, and a separate issue arose from the service advertising an HTTP URL instead of HTTPS, causing rejection by the discovery layer. The developer published the full account to highlight the gap between successfully building a functional product and actually achieving market adoption in the emerging AI-agent payments ecosystem.

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