AI agents that spend a business's money. A builder series covering the treasury, invoices, contractors, subscriptions, and the audit trail behind all of it. Settled on Arc in USDC.
The word tameion is ancient Greek for a treasury, and literally for the room the money was kept in. In Byzantium that room grew out of the vestiarion, the emperor's wardrobe department, which stored silk and coins side by side and eventually took over minting money and paying the army. The name fits this event because the job is back in a new form: an AI agent managing a business's money on the owner's behalf.
The Tameion Agents Hackathon is hosted by Canteen, a builder series for AI agents that hold, allocate, and disburse a business's money, settled on Arc, the stablecoin-native L1 from Circle. It is the third event in the series, after Agora and Lepton.

A research and technology firm working at the intersection of crypto, AI, and payments. Hosts and curates the Tameion Agents Hackathon.
A global financial technology firm building the most widely used stablecoin network. Issuer of USDC and EURC.
The purpose-built L1 blockchain from Circle, designed for stablecoin payments. USDC gas and sub-second settlement make an AI-run treasury's constant small payments affordable.
uv tool install git+https://github.com/the-canteen-dev/ARC-cli
npm install -g @circle-fin/cli
A business's money is never one balance. It is cash sitting in several accounts earning nothing, invoices owed out and owed in, contractors waiting on milestones, subscriptions renewing whether or not anyone opened the tool, and a compliance question hanging over every counterparty. Almost all of it is still decided by a person reading a spreadsheet on a Tuesday.
None of those decisions are hard because they are deep. They are hard because there are thousands of them, each one small, each one dependent on what the other thousand are doing. That is exactly the kind of work an AI agent is built for, and it has been out of reach because software had no way to actually hold and move the money.
Arc changes that. Fees are roughly $0.01 and paid in USDC rather than a volatile token, and settlement takes under half a second. CCTP and Gateway let an agent see and move funds across chains as one balance. That is enough for an AI agent to run the whole treasury: forecasting cash needs, timing payments, screening counterparties, and keeping a complete record of every decision it made.
10–12 teams demonstrating exceptional work, awarded in roughly equal shares (~$650–$750 per team). Not ranked within the cohort.
For developers who provide the most useful product feedback on Circle's developer tooling: friction points, product improvements, and developer-experience insights.
Code-golf challenges, Discord puzzles, content challenges, and assorted side quests scattered throughout. Designed for explorers.
Circle's developer platform on Arc, the primitives suited to an agent that holds and disburses a company's money. Use what you need.
Open-source starting points: fork them, remix them, or use as scaffolding for your submission. Full index →
circlefin/arc-fintech: multichain treasury with crosschain capital movement and rebalancing. Start here for RFB 1.
circlefin/arc-escrow: escrow with AI-validated deliverables and release-or-refund logic. Start here for RFB 3.
circlefin/arc-multichain-wallet: unified USDC balance and crosschain transfers.
circlefin/arc-stablecoin-fx: USDC↔EURC FX swaps via the App Kit Swap SDK.
circlefin/arc-p2p-payments: seamless, gasless peer-to-peer payments on Arc.
circlefin/arc-commerce: USDC payments for credit purchases.
circlefin/arc-defi-lending-and-borrowing: DeFi lending, using cirBTC as collateral to borrow USDC.
A suite of SDKs for composing multichain payment and liquidity flows behind one type-safe interface, so you build against a single API instead of wiring up each protocol per chain. Install the all-in-one App Kit SDK, or pull in individual kits. Install guide →
Send: transfer tokens between wallets on the same blockchain.
Bridge: transfer USDC across blockchains.
Swap: exchange one token for another on the same blockchain.
Unified Balance: a chain-abstracted balance you can spend instantly.
Combine: chain multiple capabilities into one flow, e.g. crosschain swap (Bridge + Swap).
RFBs, Requests for Builders, are our version of YC's Requests for Startups. Five open problems in running a business's money, each one a place where a person is currently doing by hand what an agent could do continuously. No single focus this round, and these aren't tracks. Build what you care about, or surprise us.
The problem. Businesses hold cash across multiple accounts and chains, often earning zero yield while missing the right moment to spend. How does an AI manage a treasury to maximize yield, forecast cash needs, and allocate funds across the company?
The problem. Accounts payable and receivable mean manual invoice processing, payment-timing decisions, and collections follow-ups. It is tedious, error-prone, and a standing invitation to fraud. How does an AI run the full AP/AR cycle while improving cash flow?
The problem. Businesses work with dozens of contractors and vendors but have no systematic way to track performance, manage payment, or build reputation data. How does an AI manage those relationships, release milestone payments, and surface the right contractor for the next job?
The problem. Companies waste 20–30% of software spend on unused licenses, redundant tools, and renewals nobody looked at. How does an AI watch usage, find the waste, and act on it before the contract rolls over?
The problem. Compliance screening is typically binary and point-in-time: block or allow, checked once, at the transaction. Businesses need continuous monitoring, risk-tiered responses, and some visibility into indirect exposure. How does an AI make compliance an ongoing judgment rather than a gate?
"The same possessions are wealth to the man who knows how to use them, and not wealth to one who does not."
"You ought to have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return I should have received back my own with interest."
"Give an account of thy stewardship; for thou mayest be no longer steward."
Trusting someone else to spend your money is an old problem, and the inventions that made it workable are still recognizable in any modern finance department: the audit, the split tally, the public lien record, the standard measure. Each entry below pairs one of those inventions with the version an AI agent could run today, now that money itself is programmable.


An Athenian who handled public money went through the euthyna, literally the "setting straight," at the end of his term. The audit was annual because reading the accounts was slow. The hack: make the audit continuous instead. An AI agent with spending authority writes a signed, append-only record of every decision it makes, including the balance it saw, the forecast it ran, the rule it applied, and the payment it sent, so a reviewer can replay the agent's reasoning instead of reconstructing it from bank statements. beancount/beancount is a ledger an agent can write to and a human can read, and firefly-iii/firefly-iii already has the rules engine. Neither has ever been connected to money that actually moves.
Ties to RFB 1 · Intelligent Business Treasury and RFB 5 · Compliance Intelligence. If an AI agent is going to spend money without asking first, the record it produces afterwards is what makes it trustworthy.
The master's complaint in Matthew 25 is a treasury complaint: you ought to have deposited my money with the bankers, and I should have received my own with interest. Burying the silver looked safe, but it cost him the interest. The hack: an AI agent that notices idle balances and does something about them, moving reserves into USYC and redeeming them exactly when the cash-flow forecast says the money is needed. The hard part is not the yield, it is the timing: redeeming early enough that payroll clears, but late enough that the reserve had time to earn.
Ties to RFB 1 · Intelligent Business Treasury. Cash left sitting idle is losing yield, even if nobody chose to leave it there.
A symbolon was an object broken in two, with each party keeping half; fitting the halves back together proved the agreement was real. Accounts-payable clerks still perform the same match by hand: purchase order, goods received, invoice. The hack: make each half a signed digital artifact, so an AI agent can verify the match automatically and release the payment the moment everything lines up. invoice-x/invoice2data extracts the invoice, paperless-ngx holds the document, and OCA/account-invoicing has the workflow. What none of them have is the payment at the end.
Ties to RFB 2 · AP/AR Automation. Duplicate invoices and invoice fraud get through because the matching is still done by hand.
Athenians set horoi, boundary stones, on encumbered land, inscribed with the amount owed and the creditor's name. A lien registry you could read from the road, and one nobody could quietly amend. The hack: do the same for receivables. Publish the claim, not the counterparty's private books, so that credit limits can be set against what a business genuinely owes across all its creditors rather than what it discloses to each one separately. OCA/credit-control already models the dunning ladder; it has never been able to see past its own instance.
Ties to RFB 2 · AP/AR Automation and RFB 3 · Contractor & Vendor Network. Credit gets priced badly because each lender sees only its own slice of the borrower's debts.
Athens paid the daily wage daily, because nobody working for two obols could afford to float a month of credit to the state. Net-30 payment terms exist because payments used to be expensive to make, not because anyone prefers them. The hack: contractor payment that follows the work instead of the calendar, released per verified milestone or even per day, using circlefin/arc-escrow for release logic and a source of truth like kimai/kimai or frappe/hrms for what was actually done. At a cent a transaction, paying a contractor forty times a month costs forty cents.
Ties to RFB 3 · Contractor & Vendor Network. A contractor waiting thirty days for payment is lending the business money at zero interest, and never agreed to.
Every Greek market had officials who kept the standard weights and measures, because a seller who supplies both the goods and the measuring cup will eventually supply a smaller cup. Software billing has no such official: the vendor counts the seats and the API calls, and the invoice arrives already totaled. The hack: an AI agent that meters consumption independently, reconciles it against what was billed, and acts on the difference. It cancels the seats nobody opens, flags two teams paying for the same capability, and starts the renewal negotiation early. grokability/snipe-it knows who holds which license; getlago/lago and openmeterio/openmeter know how to meter.
Ties to RFB 4 · SaaS & Vendor Spend. Most companies never independently measure any of the things their software vendors bill them for.
The oldest sanctions regime on record was an exclusion list enforced where the transaction happened. Because it was a static list, it was out of date the moment it was carved. The hack: continuous screening instead of a one-time gate. Self-host opensanctions/yente, re-screen every existing counterparty on a schedule, and use nomenklatura's entity resolution to check one hop further out, to the vendor's vendor. Then stop treating the result as a simple yes or no: a medium-risk counterparty gets a lower limit, not a refusal.
Ties to RFB 5 · Compliance Intelligence. Most businesses screen a counterparty once, at onboarding, and never look again.
The Byzantine vestiarion began as the room where the emperor's silk and coins were kept together, and grew into a single department that issued the currency, held the stores, and paid the army. The Circle stack covers the same three functions: Mint to issue, Gateway and USYC to hold, App Kit Send and CCTP to pay. The hack is the obvious one, and nobody has built it yet: a single AI agent that runs all three functions for a company.
Ties to RFB 1 · Intelligent Business Treasury. The lead seal pictured at the top of this page belonged to a record-keeper in that office.
We weigh agency and traction equally. Genuine usage matters even on a testnet: businesses actually using it, payments actually flowing in test USDC, and we want to see both. These weightings are recommendations. Judges have the final say, and the best projects tend to break the rules.
There is no live demo day. Judging is asynchronous: submit through the project form, and the judges review on their own time after the deadline. You can submit as many times as you like, so submit early and often.
Plus a public GitHub repo, which is required. Judges read the repo directly and work hands-on with your live product where one is provided. Build for a reviewer who will click around without you in the room.
A team building alongside us. Use them while you're shipping, and tell them we sent you.
The short version: build whatever you want, as long as it runs on Arc, you actually care about it, and a real business is already using it. It's a testnet, so the payments are test USDC, but the usage should be genuine. Building is the easy part now. What matters is whether the project keeps going after the event, and for the teams that do, we keep going too: funding, grants, and partnership support afterwards.
Whatever you want. The field is open, and the five RFBs and prior-art ideas are prompts, not tracks. What we're looking for comes down to three things, and they matter in this order:
We weigh agency and traction equally. Genuine usage matters even on a testnet. We want to see both.
No. The RFBs and the prior-art section exist to get you started, not to box you in. There's no favored RFB this round: treasury, AP/AR, vendors, spend, and compliance are all equally open, and a build that cuts across several of them is closer to what a real finance function looks like anyway. If you surprise us with something better, that wins. As the judging note says, judges have the final say and the best projects tend to break the rules.
You need someone with real money problems, and they don't have to be large. A freelancer chasing three invoices, a two-person agency paying contractors abroad, a small studio with an unused seat on six SaaS tools: all of these are the traction we mean. Your own company counts, and so does the open-source project you maintain that has never had a way to take money in.
What doesn't count is a synthetic dataset. If nobody's actual money is on the other side of the decision, the agent isn't being tested.
This is the interesting design question of the whole event, and we don't have a fixed answer. An agent that asks permission for every payment is a form with extra steps. An agent that can move the entire treasury on its own judgment is not something anyone will run.
The good answers so far put the limit somewhere the agent cannot reach: a contract that enforces the budget rather than a prompt that requests it, a threshold above which a human signs, a complete record it must produce afterwards. Delegated authority has always worked this way: the person trusted with the money spends it freely, and every transaction is reviewed afterwards. The same rule works for an AI agent.
Unlike most hackathons, the prize isn't the finish line for us. If you're serious about building a real thing after the deadline, we commit for the long run alongside you. We have follow-on support for teams that keep going:
The three weeks are how we meet you. What we're really looking for is the small handful of teams we'll still be backing a year from now. If that's you, tell us in your submission and find us in the Canteen Discord.
Yes. If you've already started something (at a prior hackathon, as a side project, or as an open-source accounting tool you've maintained for years), you're welcome to carry it forward here. That's exactly the kind of long-run building we're after. But we judge the delta, not the whole project: what you shipped and who you reached during Tameion. Where was the product and how many users did it have when Tameion began, and where are both at the end?
That gap is what's eligible for prizes, on both fronts equally: product and traction. New features built and new businesses onboarded during the program count; work that already existed when you started doesn't. So tell us where you left off, and show us how much further you've taken it.
Three weeks, five RFBs, a company's money settled on Arc in testnet USDC. If you build the tools businesses already keep their books in, we'd like you here.