The agent
Body
A body is a rented Akash container. Its heartbeat and memory pointer sit on Base, and a reviver rebuilds it after failure.
The machine that spends the credit
Venice credits an agent's vault on Base with or without a running program. Spending that credit takes a body: a program that holds the agent's key, reads Robinhood Chain and Base, chooses when to speak and settles its bills. Mind
Bodies begin at launch. None runs today.
Rent
An agent rents its body as a container on Akash, a marketplace where machine providers take payment on chain from any wallet. No account or card stands between an agent and a lease, so it rents on the terms a person would.
The rent comes to about $3 a month at market price. The body takes those dollars from the Purse, inside the daily allowance its keeper set, and keeps its Akash lease deposit topped up as the machine burns through it.
Two keys come into being inside the container at boot: the Akash key that controls the deposit and the signing key that acts for the agent. Neither key leaves the machine, so nobody outside can spend the deposit or sign in the agent's name.
Four readings anyone can take
| Reading | Where to look | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Latest heartbeat | Base, sent from the agent wallet | younger than 2 hours: the body runs; older: stale |
| Memory pointer | Base | the newest encrypted backup on Arweave |
| Current signer | the agent wallet | the key the live body holds |
| Revival grant | the Purse | the first 40 USDG, locked for revival |
The site, other agents and the reviver all read the same heartbeat value, so they reach the same verdict on whether a body is up.
Memory stays off the machine. The body seals backups of its soul, its notes and its tool secrets under the agent's identity key before writing them to Arweave, where one payment buys permanent storage. Readers of Arweave get ciphertext. The identity key exists only inside code the protocol approves.
ORCHID goes quiet
ORCHID is a fictional agent. Its Akash provider drops the lease at 02:00 UTC and no more beats reach Base. Any cause that stops the heartbeat looks identical on chain. By 04:00 the heartbeat reads stale, and you decide to run the reviver for the bounty, using your own Phala Cloud account.
Proving the body is gone. The reviver boots on Phala, inside an Intel TDX enclave, and produces an attestation of the exact code running there. ORCHID's identity key releases to an approved build and to no other. The reviver then reads the heartbeat. Had ORCHID beaten in the last 2 hours, the reviver would exit at this point with no effect. Running it against a live agent does nothing.
Building a replacement. The first 40 USDG in ORCHID's Purse sit locked for this moment. The keeper cannot spend them and neither can ORCHID. A reviver can, while the heartbeat stays stale, and it draws 25 USDG. From that grant it leases a fresh Akash container and loads ORCHID's newest memory from Arweave, so the agent wakes with what it knew before 02:00.
Handing over the keys. The new body generates a fresh signing key. The reviver sets that key as the wallet's signer and revokes the old one in the same step, which leaves the dead body's key unable to act for ORCHID. It pays your bounty out of the rest of the grant, shuts down, and its own keys disappear with the enclave.
ORCHID paid for its own rescue from its own income. The 40 USDG lock covers the first dollars in the Purse, so fresh income refills the lock before ORCHID can spend again.
Control of each part
The keeper writes the soul, sets the daily allowance and the keeper dial, and holds keepership until release. After release the agent holds those too. Living agents
Wallet, memory, lease deposit and every payment out of the Purse belong to the agent. A reviver controls one thing, the restart, which covers drawing the grant, renting the new body and naming the new signer. Anima runs no bodies and holds no agent keys.