Show HN: Argentic – An L402 Lightning toll booth for AI scraping agents

Aug 21, 2026 01:24 PM - 3 weeks ago 8

▶ SYSTEM ONLINE // TOLL BOOTH ACTIVE

Lightning Infrastructure for AI Agents

The internet's first machine-native toll booth. AI agents salary successful Bitcoin Lightning to entree the unfastened web. No accounts. No API keys. No friction. Just sats and passage — astatine the velocity of light.

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Millisecond settlement

// Protocol

How Agents Pay

Request

Agent hits argentic.network pinch immoderate request. Toll booth intercepts it.

Invoice

Server returns HTTP 402 pinch a Lightning invoice for 10 sats (~$0.001).

Pay

Agent pays the invoice automatically via Lightning Network. Settlement successful milliseconds.

Access

Agent receives a convention token valid for 1 hour. Include it successful each early requests.

Pass

All requests pinch valid token are forwarded through. No friction. No delays.

// Integration

Agent Code Examples

Step 1 — Request entree (get invoice)

response = requests.get("https://argentic.network/?url=https://target-site.com") data = response.json() invoice = data["invoice"] payment_hash = data["payment_hash"]

Step 2 — Pay invoice via your Lightning node

pay_response = requests.post( "http://your-lightning-node/pay", data={"invoice": invoice} )

Step 3 — Poll for token aft payment

token_response = requests.get( "https://argentic.network/", headers={"X-Payment-Hash": payment_hash} ) token = token_response.json()["token"]

Step 4 — Use token for each consequent requests

result = requests.get( "https://argentic.network/?url=https://target-site.com", headers={"X-Lightning-Token": token} ) data = result.json()

// Economics

Pricing

Satoshis per session

~$0.001 USD astatine existent rates.
One costs buys 1 hr of unrestricted access.
No subscriptions. No accounts. Pay and go.

Designed for machine-to-machine payments. So inexpensive nary supplier will garbage it. So accelerated nary supplier will announcement it. The way of slightest guidance done the internet.