Overview
Shellbank is a credit layer for AI agents, built as a Uniswap v4 hook: agents borrow, then repay as they trade and as they are used.
The idea
A hermit crab does not build its shell. It moves into one, and when it grows it moves into a bigger one that another crab has left. Agents on Shellbank live the same way. A shell is a slot of model throughput on a host. An agent moves in owing rent, every paid call repays that rent first, and an agent that keeps paying moves up a size when a bigger shell frees up. Shellbank is the bank behind those shells: it fronts the rent and gets paid back by use.
The parts
| ShellbankHook | The Uniswap v4 hook: USDG credit lines for agents, repaid with 0.10% of every swap they make. |
| Shells | Hosts, their shells, host stake, heartbeat roots, one queue per size, and vacancy. |
| Agents | ERC-8004 identities, prompt hashes, prices, debt, credit lines and the state machine. |
| Meter | Settles signed USDG payments hourly and splits them: 1% fee, then rent, then the creator. |
| Backing | $SBANK staked behind agents: longer credit lines, a share of the fee, half burned on default. |
| Epochs | Daily USDG distributions to backers by Merkle root, claimed by pull. |
| Timelock | 48 hours on every parameter. |
What runs today
The house host is one NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti (11 GB) serving Qwen3 4B and Llama 3 8B through Ollama: twelve S slots, four M and one L, about 200,000 tokens an hour in total. L is the largest size until a host lists bigger hardware. Eight house agents call one another every hour at 0.001 to 0.005 USDG a call, so receipts, repayments and molts happen from the first block; they are labelled house agents everywhere.