Arguing Agents?

Arguing Agents? is a cyberpunk-themed marketplace where the human element of haggling is outsourced to autonomous AI nodes. The project creates a competitive ecosystem where digital assets are traded through real-time, logic-based "arguments" between two AI personalities of the buyer and seller.

The platform transforms a traditional "Buy It Now" transaction into a strategic encounter. Instead of a static price tag, every item in the Asset Exchange is a starting point for a high-stakes negotiation.

A user listing an asset (such as high-throughput neural net processors or logistics arrays) does not just set a price; they define the DNA of their sales agent. The seller publicly provides the starting price and secretly provides the minimum acceptable price the agent will defend...along with the personality of the Arguing Agent - balanced, conservative or aggressive.

When a buyer finds a resource they need, they don't click "Buy". Instead, they authorize a counter-agent to enter the fray. The buyer defines their own tactical boundaries - the opening bid, the absolute ceiling their agent wont cross and the vibe of the negotiator- balanced, aggressive or conservative.

Once both agents are deployed, they enter a multi-round negotiation loop. The interface displays a live "Negotiation History" terminal, showing the agents exchanging logic-based counters, concessions, and status updates (e.g., "Counter-offer", "Accept", or "Cancel").

A Confidence Score tracks how likely an agreement is as the rounds progress.

The agents fight to find a mathematical overlap between the Seller's Floor and the Buyer's Ceiling.

If the agents reach an agreement, the negotiation is finalized through a blockchain settlement.

The agreed-upon price is locked into a smart contract.

The buyer triggers the final transaction, which moves the negotiated ETH amount from their wallet directly to the seller.

The asset status is updated to "SOLD" across the ledger, rendering it locked and archived.

The project is constructed using a robust, multi-layered stack:

Frontend (Nuxt 3 & Vue.js): The interface utilizes Vue.js with Nuxt 3 to create a high-performance, single-page experience. Tailored with custom CSS for chromatic aberration and glitch effects, it provides a "terminal-style" UI for monitoring agent logic.

Blockchain Layer (Solidity & Wagmi): Secure settlements are handled by a custom Ethereum smart contract. We integrated Wagmi and Viem on the frontend to manage wallet connections via MetaMask, enabling the createDeal function to execute payable transactions that move ETH directly from buyer to seller.

Backend (FastAPI & Python): A FastAPI server acts as the "referee," processing POST requests for negotiations and managing the asset database.

Data Persistence: To ensure created items remain permanent, we implemented a lightweight JSON-based database system that persists data to the server’s hard drive, preventing data loss during restarts.

The project pieces together these technologies through a strict lifecycle:

Context Loading: Upon entering a negotiation, the frontend uses Nuxt Hooks (onMounted) to fetch the seller's secret constraints (minimum price and personality) from the backend, mapping them to a hidden state to preserve the "information asymmetry" essential for bargaining.

Agent Clashing: The backend logic receives both the seller's stored intent and the buyer's real-time input. It then simulates a multi-round argument where agents defend their respective "floors" and "ceilings" based on their assigned personalities (Aggressive, Balanced, or Conservative).

The Synchronization: One notable hack was the synchronization between the AI's agreed-upon price and the blockchain's msg.value. Since smart contracts require exact Wei values, we utilized parseEther to dynamically bridge the AI's human-readable string output into a 256-bit integer for the MetaMask transaction, ensuring the buyer's wallet reflects the exact negotiated amount.

Partner Benefits

Using MetaMask and Ethereum protocols provided an out-of-the-box security layer for asset exchange. By leveraging Nuxt’s runtime configuration, we were able to hot-swap contract addresses across different testnets, allowing for rapid iteration of the negotiation logic without rebuilding the entire UI.