Show HN: BasaltSurge – Web3 POS checkout and AI-agent commerce API
surge.basalthq.comI’m Michael, and my team at BasaltHQ has been building BasaltSurge. We originally started this under the name PortalPay, but recently rebranded as the scope expanded. It’s a payment engine designed to bypass legacy card rails at the physical point of sale and provide a standardized checkout layer for AI agents.
Having worked extensively on data and payment solutions for high-friction retail environments where traditional processors take massive cuts or deny service entirely, we wanted to build something genuinely permissionless.
Here is a breakdown of what we built:
QR-Based POS Checkout: Merchants print a QR code on their standard POS receipt. Customers scan it to access a white-labeled, web3-native checkout on their phone. It accepts USDC, USDT, cbBTC, and ETH on the Base network. We utilize Account Abstraction (AA) for gas sponsorship so the end-user UX isn't bottlenecked by network fee friction.
Built for the Machine Economy: We unified Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) with the HTTP 402 (Payment Required) standard. The platform auto-generates llms.txt markdown feeds of a merchant's inventory so AI models can reliably discover and cart items without fragile DOM scraping. When an agent hits the 402 challenge, it negotiates an instant on-chain settlement.
Programmable Routing & Splits: Everything settles on-chain with automated revenue splitting and reserve management, allowing businesses to dictate token mix and partner payouts without a middleman.
We also recently added a module called Osiris USBN—an on-chain identifier for publishers that costs $0.002 instead of the legacy $250 ISBN standard, while baking in programmable royalties on resale.
We’ve shipped SDKs (TypeScript, Python, Go) and headless checkout integrations for Shopify and WooCommerce to make adoption as zero-friction as possible.
There's a live mobile portal preview right on the landing page you can click through to test the UI. I'd love to get your feedback on the UCP/402 implementation, our architecture on Base, or how you see agent-to-agent checkout evolving!
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