Marque: agents that carry a budget, not your keys

A creative studio on Base mainnet where AI agents carry a scoped, revocable MetaMask Smart Account budget, make your brief on Venice AI, pay per render through the 1Shot permissionless relayer, and mint the result to you as an NFT. You pay the exact price quoted, per render, and own everything you make.

The 30-second pitch

Marque is a live mainnet creative studio on Base. You describe a brief, and a crew of specialist AI agents builds it: an image set, a voiceover, a music track, a video, or a full ad assembled from all of them.

The agents never hold your keys or your funds. Instead, your studio account (a MetaMask Smart Account) hands each run a capped, revocable ERC-7710 delegation. The agent spends inside that envelope on Venice AI's premium models, every payment settles on Base mainnet through the 1Shot permissionless relayer with gas paid in USDC, and the finished piece is minted to you as an NFT with a full on-chain record of what it cost.

The number on the button is the exact Venice cost, quoted up front from the live Video Quote API. You pay that exact amount per render, you own every result, and you withdraw whatever you do not spend. The agent carries a budget, not your keys.

The problem

Two things are broken.

1. Creation is taxed by subscriptions. To make one ad you rent Midjourney, ElevenLabs, Suno, and Runway: around $90 a month for access you mostly leave idle, priced for access rather than use, and you still own nothing you make.

2. Agents cannot safely hold money. The reason nobody just bills per use for an autonomous agent is custody. To pay across those services, an agent has to hold money, and there has never been a safe way to do it. An API key is an unbounded drain. A card on file has no revocation and no granularity. A hot wallet is a honeypot. So the industry defaulted to subscriptions.

Marque fixes both by making the agent carry a scoped, revocable budget instead of keys: a MetaMask delegation, capped and time-boxed. Safe per-use billing for an autonomous agent finally becomes possible, and the subscriptions fall away.

What we built

A studio account that is your balance. Connect MetaMask and sign once, and Marque derives a MetaMask Smart Account (Stateless EIP-7702) deterministically from that signature. Fund it with USDC, generate against it, withdraw anytime. It is recoverable across devices and controlled only by you.

A crew of specialists, each a real Venice model. Concept (qwen3-235b) writes the brief into a script and storyboard. Image (seedream) generates each scene. Voice (tts-kokoro) narrates. Music (stable-audio) scores an original soundtrack. Video (seedance / kling / veo3) brings the scenes to motion and assembles the cut.

An x402 plus ERC-7710 facilitator. Our broker turns a signed delegation chain into a real on-chain settlement through the 1Shot relayer, and runs the Venice inference.

Quote-first pricing. The button shows the exact price before you generate, computed from Venice's live Video Quote API plus verified fixed rates (image $0.05, music $0.24, voice by character count, video from $0.07 per clip). On success, your account is debited exactly that amount. On failure, you pay nothing.

On-chain provenance. Every finished piece is a MarquePiece ERC-721 minted to your studio account, its media pinned to IPFS, recording the brief, the exact spend, and the settlement transactions that paid for it.

How the budget works

Your MetaMask only ever signs a deposit, a withdraw, or the one signature that derives your studio account. It never signs a transaction it did not initiate.

When you create, your studio account signs a fresh ERC-7710 delegation, capped in USDC and time-boxed, to an ephemeral director agent. The director redelegates a narrower budget to the 1Shot relayer target. This is the A2A chain: studio account, to director, to relayer.

The 1Shot relayer redeems the chain on Base mainnet and pays gas in USDC, so the agents hold zero ETH. The delegation's caveats enforce the cap on-chain. You are debited exactly the quoted generation cost plus the relayer's network fee, never more.

How a generation works

Generate-first, settle-on-success is a real property, not a metaphor. The broker only redeems the delegation after the render succeeds, so a failed or overloaded generation costs you exactly nothing.

Why this hits every track

We use each sponsor technology on the critical path of the product, not as decoration.

No architectural choice we made compromises this. The sponsor stack is not a checkbox here, it is the chassis.

What is already live on mainnet today

• MarquePiece ERC-721 deployed and verified on Base mainnet (chain 8453)

• Real end-to-end runs settle on mainnet: single-hop and two-hop A2A delegation redemptions, full broker plus Venice generations across every medium, and pieces minted to real studio accounts, all in real USDC

• Quote-first pricing is live: the button shows the exact Venice cost and the account is debited precisely that amount; a failed render charges zero

• Gasless withdraw is live: unspent USDC returns to your MetaMask through the 1Shot relayer

This is not a demo on testnet. This is not a mock. Every payment is real USDC on Base mainnet, and every piece in a gallery is a real NFT you can open on Basescan.

Try it

• Web app: marque-run.vercel.app

• GitHub: github.com/wildanrhmn/marque.run

• Demo video: youtube.com/wildanrhmn

• Contract (MarquePiece, Base mainnet): basescan.org/address/0x478Bb80C56a708ded5A2f3D2EA0d204aEE92a01b

Foundations (late May):

• Scaffolded a pnpm monorepo with packages for shared schemas, x402 (EIP-3009), delegation (caveats, redemption), and the agent crew

• Built the broker as a delegation-to-x402 gateway, shipped the provenance ERC-721, and a first dashboard with a live agent timeline and mint path

Mainnet integration (early-mid June):

• Wired the real Venice pipeline across five mediums: chat, image, voice, music, and video

• Proved ERC-7710 redemption on Base mainnet through the 1Shot relayer, then wired the broker as an x402-7710 facilitator to that proven shape

• Wired the studio to a MetaMask Smart Account (Stateless EIP-7702) derived from one signature, with A2A redelegation (session, to director, to relayer) and gasless USDC withdraw through 1Shot

• Added IPFS provenance via Pinata, deployed MarquePiece, and wired the gallery to read on-chain pieces

Studio and quote-first pricing (submission week):

• Unified the studio into a Polymarket-style balance account with a slide-over wallet drawer, and ran every media type through the on-chain flow including ffmpeg video compositing

• Made generation settle only on success, so a failed render never charges

• Reworked pricing to quote-first: the button shows the exact cost from Venice's live Video Quote API plus verified fixed rates, the full pipeline settles behind a single on-chain redemption, and the account is debited precisely that amount

• Added an image-count grid, fixed the gallery, designed the hallmark-seal logo and favicon, and upgraded Next.js for a clean deploy

Where it stands at submission:

• MarquePiece ERC-721 live and verified on Base mainnet (chain 8453)

• Real runs settle end to end: single-hop and A2A redemptions, full Venice generations across every medium, and pieces minted to real studio accounts, all in real USDC

• Quote-first pricing is exact (button cost equals the amount debited, failures charge nothing), and gasless withdraw is verified

Marque is fully bootstrapped. No outside capital raised to date. Open to pre-seed conversations from investors or strategic partners aligned with the ecosystem; not actively running a round.