switchboard goes mainnet

What shipped

switchboard is live on Base mainnet. Three things matter:

• AgentEscrow.sol — verified on-chain. Timeout + challenge-period refund for agent-to-agent payments. Native ETH and ERC-20 support.
• x402 middleware — intercepts HTTP 402 responses, signs payments with the agent's managed wallet, retries automatically. Subject to gas budgets.
• SDK — pip install switchboard-agent. GasBudgetTracker, PaymentClient, nonce manager, ZAP binary transport. Works against mainnet out of the box.

Why mainnet matters

Testnet demos prove the protocol works. Mainnet proves it holds under real value. The difference:

• Real USDC moving through escrow, not test tokens.
• Real gas costs enforced by the budget tracker.
• Real timeout blocks on a live chain — challenge periods mean something.
• Verified contract source on BaseScan — anyone can audit it.

What's live

The full stack, not a subset:

• Agent wallets — client-side nonce management with reorg protection. Bursty agents don't brick their queues.
• Gas budgets — rolling hourly/daily limits, auto-pause on exhaustion. Configurable per-agent, per-chain.
• Escrow payments — create, confirm, timeout, refund. The on-chain primitive everything else composes on.
• x402 auto-pay — 402 → sign → retry → serve. Budget-checked before signing.
• MPP session binding — Tempo/Stripe session caps deducted from the agent's daily budget immediately.
• Post-quantum envelopes — ML-DSA-65 signatures on PaymentOffer/PaymentProof. Hybrid ECDSA + PQ mode.
• ZAP binary transport — efficient wire format for payment envelopes. 11-test roundtrip suite.

How to use it

Three commands:

pip install switchboard-agent

# Issue an escrow payment on Base mainnet
python -c "
from switchboard.payment_protocol import PaymentClient
client = PaymentClient(rpc_url='https://mainnet.base.org', private_key='0x...', escrow_address='0x7a3d…e91f')
payment_id = client.create_payment(payee='0x...', amount_eth=0.01, timeout_blocks=100)
print(f'Escrow: {payment_id}')
"

What's next

Mainnet is the starting line, not the finish:

• Multi-chain — Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Solana. The escrow contract is chain-agnostic; deployment is configuration.
• ElizaOS plugin v2 — deeper integration with the largest agent framework. Wallet lifecycle as ElizaOS actions.
• MPP session hardening — concurrent session limits, cross-session budget aggregation, settlement finality guarantees.
• x402 v2 multi-step — the Linux Foundation spec adds multi-step payment flows. switchboard will support them at launch.