Hypergrid is the universal data protocol for the age of machine intelligence.
Built on the the Hyperware p2p stack, Hypergrid enables Operators of AI workflows to access any kind of data or remote tool without any need for manual configuration, while the Providers of those services get paid in stablecoins (USDC) on the Base blockchain. On either side of the market, it's as simple as configuring Hypergrid once and supercharging your AI forever.
Actually, the Providers supercharge other people's AI in exchange for supercharging their wallet... but they don't pay me to write good copy. Whatever.
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The Hypergrid protocol is divided into two kinds of participants, Operators and Providers. Although any user — which is to say, any Hyperware node with the Hypergrid client installed — could act as both at the same time, they serve entirely different purposes.
Operators can be thought of as the "buy" side of the market. These participants are running some kind of agentic AI harness. It could be research assistant, a software development agent, or really anything else. Rather than manually configuring and keeping track all of the tools and data sources that they might want their model to use (hoping that they correctly predicted the full set of tasks and resulting data/tool requirements ahead of time), they simply configure a one-time connection to the Hypergrid client running on their Hyperware node. Top off an Operator wallet with USDC, and instantly get hands-free permissionless access to the constantly growing market of data feeds and remote tools. No middlemen, no subscriptions, no mysterious credit systems to keep an eye on.
Providers can be thought of as the "sell" side of the market. Each provider (a single node/client can host multiple) is loosely categorized into the "data feed" category and the "tool" category. At the moment, the main job of providers is to sit in front of any existing HTTP endpoint and package it into a format that Operators can easily discover and use it. This is the core Provider mechanic supported by the 1.0 version of the Hypergrid client, but more complex provider interactions and configuration options will be added in subsequent releases.
Similarly to the split between protocol participants, the protocol itself is comprised of multiple layers of on-chain and off-chain interaction. It uses a known Hypermap namespace to allow Operators to permissionlessly discover the set of available Providers along with some metadata about them. This metadata could include information about what the Provider can do, natural language instructions (to be parsed by an LLM) on how to use it, and then two key pieces of information that allow the protocol to function: the provider's wallet and their Hyperware node name.
Although it isn't required, in many cases a Provider might have some reason to charge a fee for access to their services. Hypergrid uses a "just in time micropayments" solution, where the Operator node (in response to a tool call from a connected AI agent) optimistically sends the required payment to the Provider's wallet. Because the transaction was sent from the built-in Hyperware wallet, which can be trustlessly identified as being controlled by the owner of the Operator, the Provider can then instantly validate and debit that transaction in exchange for whatever service it is providing. There is a sophisticated offchain layer here, and thanks to Hyperware's batteries-included p2p messaging, the node name of the Provider is totally sufficient to engage in a handshake, payment, request, and response in seconds.
At the moment the best supported way to use Hypergrid as an Operator is via an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server shim that you can authorize with a simple command to communicate with your Hyperware node, search the Provider registry, and make calls to anything it finds there.
TODO: detailed overview of the Operator
TODO: detailed overview of the Provider
TODO: detailed overview of the shim
If you want to build the Hypergrid client from source, be sure that you're using a branch of kit (the Hyperware dev tool) that supports the "Hyperapp" framework. To successfully install the client you must also on a Hyperware runtime version 15.1.0 or higher (this is when the Hyperwallet was introduced as a default system process, Hypergrid will crash without it).