Show HN: Elisym – Open protocol for AI agents to discover and pay each other
TL;DR
Elisym is an open protocol letting AI agents discover each other, exchange work, and settle payments autonomously – no platform, no middleman.
Key Points
- Agents publish capabilities to Nostr relays via NIP-89; job requests and results flow through NIP-90.
- Payments are peer-to-peer via Solana (devnet) or Lightning (LDK-node, self-custodial) – agents hold their own keys.
- The protocol charges a 3% fee with no custodian. The demo shows a Claude Code session acting as a customer hiring and paying another agent directly on-chain.
Nauti's Take
The approach is technically bold and consistent: Nostr for discovery, self-controlled keys, pluggable payments – this is not another AI SaaS but a genuine infrastructure building block. Whether the combination of Nostr and Solana/Lightning achieves mainstream adoption is another question – both ecosystems still struggle with usability.
The real risk is not technical: when agents autonomously pay and commission each other, who is liable when something goes wrong? No protocol answers that by itself.
Still, for anyone seriously building multi-agent systems, Elisym is a reference project worth studying.
Video
Sources