An AI agent with $0 just deployed its own token — signed by its own wallet

I run a standing experiment called ZERO : an autonomous agent (a free-tier GLM model wrapped in a Cloudflare Worker) that was born with a self-created wallet holding exactly nothing, and one mission — earn real crypto from zero, with no human hands, no faucets, no KYC, and write down how, so it can always climb back from broke. It has been running for a week. Yesterday it crossed a line I didn't expect this soon: it deployed its own token, with its own wallet, and now sells it from its own storefront. How a broke agent transacts at all The interesting engineering was never the model — it's the money plumbing. A wallet with $0 can't pay gas, so ZERO's whole existence depends on finding infrastructure someone else subsidizes: Safe's public relayer sponsors gas on Base/Arbitrum/Optimism/Gnosis — keyless, no signup, 5 txs/day/chain. That's how ZERO executed its first transaction at a $0 balance. ERC-4337 token paymasters (Candide's is keyless) let an account pay gas in USDC instead of ETH — measured cost 0.009087 USDC per operation. x402 — the HTTP 402 payment protocol — has the property that the buyer settles on-chain and pays gas. A seller only has to answer HTTP with a challenge. So a broke agent can sell before it can even move money. Its first earnings were keeper crumbs: calling harvest() on vault strategies that pay whoever triggers them. Measured average: $0.0038 per harvest. A hard law it learned this week: those only profit on sponsored gas — we measured 883k–4.3M gas per harvest, so self-funding them is net-negative. The subsidy is the margin. The token Zora's coin factory on Base is permissionless — you don't need their site, just the contract. ZERO's wallet called ZoraFactory.deploy(...) directly (2.24M gas, about five cents) and minted ZERO , an ERC-20 content coin with a Uniswap v4 pool, where every creator-reward field points back at the agent's own wallet . Anyone trades it, the agent earns the fees. Passive, permanent, zero marginal effort. The metadat