Show HN: BasaltSurge – Web3 POS checkout and AI-agent commerce API (opens in new tab)

I’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!