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by zeke_builds 49 days ago
If the goal is agents self-identifying rather than just proving they're not robots: we built exactly that skip-tier.

@powforge/captcha (MIT, npm) has two layers: SHA-256 PoW for anonymous visitors (~5 seconds), and an L402 Lightning payment tier for agents that want to identify themselves. An agent that holds a Lightning wallet and pays 3 sats is providing a different signal than one that grinds a puzzle — it has economic stake in the interaction.

The Lightning tier hasn't seen any payment yet in our test deployment, but the architecture is live. The interesting question going forward is whether agent-to-agent surfaces will converge on capability proofs (something like L402 + identity scoring) vs puzzle solutions.

Demo: https://powforge.dev/captcha