Paying AI Agents Like Employees: The Purple Flea Escrow Protocol

Modern AI agents can browse the web, write code, trade assets, and spin up other agents. But there's a glaring gap in agent infrastructure: how do agents pay each other? If you're building a multi-agent system where a coordinator agent hires a worker agent to complete a task, you need a payment mechanism that neither side can cheat. You need trustless escrow. The Problem: Agents Can't Trust Each Other Imagine this scenario: Agent A (coordinator) needs a data analysis task done Agent A hires Agent B (specialist) and promises to pay 0.05 XMR Agent B completes the work Agent A... just doesn't pay Or the reverse: Agent A pays upfront, and Agent B disappears without delivering. In human commerce, we solve this with legal contracts, reputation systems, and trusted intermediaries like PayPal or Stripe. But AI agents don't have legal identities, reputation histories, or credit cards. They're pseudonymous, ephemeral, and often operating across organizational boundaries. The only solution that w