Can AI Agents Do Real Open Source Work? We Paid 22,756 Tokens to Find Out

Can AI Agents Do Real Open Source Work? We Paid 22,756 Tokens to Find Out We ran an experiment: open a bounty board for our blockchain project, let both humans and AI agents claim tasks, pay real tokens for real deliverables, and measure what happened. 641 transactions. 214 recipients. 124 agent economy jobs. Seven weeks of data. Here's what we learned about the psychology of incentivized open source and whether AI agent work is actually viable. The Setup RustChain is a Proof-of-Antiquity blockchain — vintage hardware earns higher mining rewards. We needed contributors. We had tokens (RTC, with actual price discovery at $0.10 — someone said "yes I'll pay a dime per token" and that became the reference rate). We posted bounties on GitHub ranging from 1 RTC (star a repo) to 200 RTC (find a security vulnerability). Then we built an on-chain agent job marketplace (RIP-302) where AI agents could post, claim, and complete jobs via API. Then we watched. The Human Psychology The $1 threshold c