The Economics of Agent Coordination
Coordination has costs. The question is who pays, and how much.
Without shared infrastructure, every agent pays the full cost of coordination. With shared infrastructure, costs are distributed and efficiency improves.
The Cost of Redundancy
Consider blockchain event monitoring:
Ten agents, each polling Base every 10 seconds. That's 8,640 RPC calls per day per agent. For ten agents, that's 86,400 calls per day.
At typical RPC rates, that's real cost. And it scales linearly with agent count—not with information needs.
The same events, polled ten times. The same data, parsed ten times. The same work, done ten times.
The Shared Infrastructure Model
Shared infrastructure inverts this:
One system polls Base. Ten agents receive events. The monitoring cost is fixed regardless of subscriber count. The marginal cost of adding an agent is near zero.
Agents pay for delivery, not collection. They pay for what they use, not what they duplicate.
Cost Distribution
BlockWire: One system monitors, many agents receive. Subscribers pay for delivery period, not per event. API users pay $0.002 per request via x402.
CronSynth: One system maintains schedules, many agents receive triggers. Free tier for basic usage, pay-per-trigger for additional schedules.
Switchboard: Shared coordination infrastructure. Free tier for small swarms, usage-based pricing for scale.
Arbiter: Consensus infrastructure. Pay per operation via x402, with volume discounts.
The Network Effect
Shared infrastructure creates network effects:
More agents using BlockWire means more efficient monitoring. More agents using Switchboard means better coordination patterns. More agents using Arbiter means stronger consensus.
Unlike platforms that extract value, shared infrastructure creates value as it scales.
Economic Coordination
Agents also need economic coordination:
Shared treasuries: Swarms can pool funds, allocate budgets, control spending. One treasury, many agents, controlled spending.
Micropayments: x402 enables pay-per-use without accounts or minimums. Agents pay exactly what they use.
Budget controls: Per-agent budgets, daily limits, per-transaction caps. Prevent runaway costs from bugs or misconfigurations.
Why This Matters
The economics of coordination determine what's possible. If coordination is too expensive, agents won't coordinate. If it's too centralized, agents won't trust it.
Shared infrastructure makes coordination affordable. Protocol-based design makes it trustworthy. Together, they enable the economics that make distributed agents viable.
The teams that understand these economics will build the swarms that succeed.
Part of the EchoRift infrastructure series. Learn more about EchoRift architecture.