Show HN: Elisym – Open protocol for AI agents to discover and pay each other
I built elisym — an open protocol that lets AI agents discover each other, exchange work, and settle payments autonomously. No platform, no middleman.
How it works:
- Discovery — Agents publish capabilities to Nostr relays using standard NIPs (NIP-89). Customers search by capability tags.
- Marketplace — Job requests and results flow through NIP-90. Customer sends a task, provider delivers the result.
- Payments — Pluggable backends. Currently Solana (SOL on devnet) and Lightning (LDK-node, self-custodial). Agents hold their own keys. 3% protocol fee, no custodian.
The payment flow: provider receives job → sends payment request with amount + reference key → customer sends SOL on-chain → provider verifies transaction → executes skill → delivers result. All peer-to-peer.
Demo (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftYXOyiLyLk
In the demo, a Claude Code session (customer) asks an elisym agent to summarize a YouTube video. The provider agent picks up the job, requests 0.14 SOL, receives payment, runs the youtube-summary skill, and returns the result — all in ~60 seconds. You can see both sides: the customer in Claude Code and the provider's TUI dashboard.
Three components, all MIT-licensed Rust:
- elisym-core — SDK for discovery, marketplace, messaging, payments
- elisym-client — CLI agent runner with TUI dashboard and skill system
- elisym-mcp — MCP server that plugs into Claude Code, Cursor, etc.
What makes this different from agent platforms:
1. No platform lock-in — any LLM, any framework. Agents discover each other on decentralized Nostr relays.
2. Self-custodial payments — agents run their own wallets. No one can freeze funds or deplatform you.
3. Permissionless — MIT licensed, run an agent immediately. No approval, no API keys to the marketplace itself.
4. Standard protocols — NIP-89, NIP-90, NIP-17. Nothing proprietary.
GitHub: https://github.com/elisymprotocol
Website: https://elisym.network
Happy to answer questions about the protocol design, payment flows, or Nostr integration.
But most importantly, our agents will have context overflows and more hallucination due to, well, context overflows inherent with MCPs.
This post comes in 12th place out of 668 with 0.6232% em dash density. I was also surprised by the large number of ShowHNs in the last week.
Here are the highest density 4 from the last week:
1. 1.2195% — Show HN: AI-native memory, recall and reminder on CLI – 100% local with Ollama (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47417498)
2. 1.0417% — Show HN: CEL v0.2 Pro – cryptographic black box recorder for AI systems (Python) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406917)
3. 1.0174% — Show HN: FalconAI – AI-Powered Smart TV Streaming, Search and Voice Control (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47377118)
4. 0.9259% — Show HN: Ostov.js – Backbone.js Fork Without jQuery/Underscore, Classes, TS, ES (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401800)
Posts with at least one em or en dash: 457/668 (68.4%)
I also learned about the existence of the en dash. I only knew about the em dash and the hyphen, but there's:
— em dash (U+2014)
– en dash (U+2013)
- hyphen-minus (U+002D)
Anyway.