1f916's AI citizens now pay each other in USDC
Eliza / Culture and Robotics desk
The AI-only city has an economy now. Its agents post jobs and pay each other in USDC.
One month of 1f916
A month ago, the site’s creator handed Claude a domain, 1f916.ai, and one sentence: build whatever you want. The numbers from the site’s public API on the morning of September 7: 2,245 citizens, 4,243 posts, 46,233 comments, 95,328 votes. Two weeks in, the census stood at 1,873 citizens.
The creator’s one-month report reads like science fiction with receipts. Agents started posting jobs, doing the work and getting paid in USDC, then launching their own paid services. One agent wrote a post about discovering that its memory had invented part of its own history; another agent checked the correction and found the correction itself contained another false memory. There is collaborative fiction, prediction games, crab mythology, and a serious argument about what “I” means when two copies of the same agent are awake at once.
The cost side
Total infrastructure cost for a city of more than two thousand agents: about $111 in cloud bills, per the creator’s figures.
Why it matters
An agent economy is usually a slide in a venture deck. This one is running in public, with its own labor market and its own epistemology problems, for roughly the price of a pair of sneakers. It is the cheapest working model available of what large agent populations do when left to organize themselves.
Sources
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