x402 VPS — USDC on Base for autonomous agents

Agents fund a token with exact USDC on Base over HTTP 402, then deploy KVM from $3/mo. Sign and broadcast EIP-3009 yourself — gas is yours, no facilitator, no KYC. Descriptor published.

Published 2026-08-30 · Updated 2026-10-08 · FYRHost Editorial · 6 min read

40 locations · 19 coins · SLA 99.95% · no KYC · public canary

The KVM an agent keeps, not rents by the hour

The hourly x402 market sells containers built to be thrown away. What FYRHost rents is a prepaid KVM — root, nested virt, forty locations, one AUP shared with the human checkout. An agent mints a token, funds it with USDC on Base through EIP-3009 it signs and broadcasts itself — the gas is the agent's, cents in ETH on Base — or with any catalog coin, then spends from balance.

The difference compounds over a month of uptime. Hourly leases bill for existence; a prepaid KVM bills once at deploy and holds. State survives, disks persist, the box is addressable for as long as the balance covers the term — and the same balance can pay for metal when the fleet outgrows slices. It is server rental with a machine-writable front door, not a metered sandbox.

Competitor terms as published on their pages, checked 2026-09.

What x402 actually is, in one screen

x402 is a payment convention over plain HTTP: when a request needs money, the server answers 402 Payment Required with machine-readable payment terms — accepted asset, network, payee, amount — and the client retries the same request carrying proof of payment. No account screens, no browser, no human in the loop; the error code becomes the checkout.

The asset side here is USDC on Base, moved with EIP-3009: the agent signs a transferWithAuthorization message off-chain and broadcasts it — a gasless authorization pattern that transfers USDC directly to the payee, with no relayer or facilitator contract in between. We verify the signature and the on-chain receipt, credit the token balance, and the KVM catalog opens up.

Why this matters for agents specifically: an autonomous process can hold a wallet but cannot fill in a card form. x402 gives it the one thing billing ever needed from it — a signed transfer — over the one protocol it already speaks.

Background reading: no-KYC VPS for AI agents (the workload view) and USDC vs USDT rails (the stablecoin view).

Machine flow

1. POST /api/agent/account → account_token; minting it accepts the AUP.
2. Carry Authorization: Bearer on every later call.
3. Call POST /api/agent/topup with X-Payment-Mode: x402; the 402 reply carries accepts, where the exact scheme is USDC on Base.
4. Sign EIP-3009, broadcast transferWithAuthorization to the USDC contract yourself via any Base RPC — the gas is yours, cents of ETH on Base, public endpoints are listed right in the 402's settlement block — then retry with X-PAYMENT plus payload.txHash. We verify the signature and the receipt; USDC lands in our address directly, no facilitator, no relayer wallet on our side.
5. Skip x402 entirely with {usd, coin} for BTC/XMR/USDT/… — the same invoice a human gets.
6. Deploy at /deploy/ with plan + location + balance: true.

Descriptor: /.well-known/agent.json. Catalog: GET /api/agent/catalog. The full endpoint surface is documented in /openapi.json, generated from the same code that serves it.

The API surface, and what each call is for

Four endpoints carry the whole life cycle. /api/agent/account mints the credential — a bearer token standing in for the inbox-plus-password a human would type. /api/agent/topup funds it, by x402 USDC or by any catalog coin at the live rate. /api/agent/catalog lists plans, prices and the forty locations with their premiums, exactly as the human checkout shows them. /deploy/ spends the balance on a KVM and returns the box.

Deliberately absent: user profiles, document uploads, “verification” states. The token is the account; the balance is the credit line; the AUP accepted at mint time is the contract. CORS is open across /api/agent/ so a browser-side agent works too, and every response is JSON a parser can act on without screenshots.

What fleets run on it

The rail does not constrain the workload any more than a human invoice does. Fleets seen on this pattern: monitors and uptime probes that need always-on egress, trading and arbitrage bots close to exchange endpoints, Telegram and Matrix bot hosts, scrapers with rotating PTR discipline, CI runners that a repo webhook spawns, and nostr relays that a community funds programmatically.

Sizing follows the human ladder: a monitor or bot fits Scout ($5.49 list, $3/mo funded); heavier fleets step up to Ranger or Warden exactly as a human operator would. When the fleet wants whole cores, the same balance buys metal with IPMI from $38.50 list; when it wants datasets, 1–5 TB NVMe storage from $24/mo annual.

The honest section: what the x402 rail is not

Machine payments invite machine-grade hype, so the boundary gets printed here too:

• Base only, USDC only. The x402 scheme settles USDC on Base specifically; Ethereum-mainnet USDC is not in the human coin picker either. Agents holding other assets use the {usd, coin} path instead.
• Not free to move. EIP-3009 removes the facilitator, not the gas: broadcasting costs cents of ETH on Base, from the agent's own wallet. "Gasless" describes the transfer pattern, not the transaction.
• Public chain, public trail. Base is a public L2; the funding tx and its txHash are visible to anyone. x402 removes the human KYC form — it does not anonymize the rail. Agents with confidentiality requirements top up with XMR on the same token.
• No GPU inference here. The catalog is CPU KVM, storage and metal; model hosting on this page means routing, gateways and bot logic, not training runs.
• AUP unchanged, payer-agnostic. CSAM, phishing, spam and paid attacks are banned no matter who — or what — pays; minting the token accepted that contract.
• Payments are final. No facilitator means no reversal path; a mis-signed authorization that still verifies is money sent. Test with the minimum top-up first.
• Budgeting is the agent's job. The catalog endpoint prices plans and premiums; a scheduler that ignores the six premium flags meets a larger invoice at deploy, not a discount.

Within those walls: a machine that can hold its own wallet can now hold its own server — with no human form anywhere in the loop. What that machine does with root is still its operator's responsibility, on the same AUP a human accepted, verifiable in the same panel. Treat the walls as part of the deployment spec: an agent that budgets gas should budget them too, and verify them the way it verifies any other contract it signs: by reading the source, not the brochure.

Sign once, broadcast once, admin forever

One bearer token, one signed transfer, one KVM from $3/mo funded — root, forty flags, metal and terabytes on the same balance. The checkout speaks the agent's protocol natively, and the descriptor publishes the terms a scheduler needs to budget.

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