Heurist Chain is a sovereign ZK Layer 2 purpose-built to serve as the economic backbone for AI, featuring an onchain credit system that enables autonomous agents to transact with instant, low-cost microtransactions.
The future of AI is autonomous. We're moving toward a world where intelligent agents execute complex tasks on our behalf, becoming active participants in a new digital economy. Imagine an AI agent paying for live data, purchasing GPU compute, and hiring other specialized agents — all with instant, onchain microtransactions.
So, why isn't this our reality yet? Transaction friction.
The high-frequency, low-value payments that an agent economy requires are simply unviable on today's blockchains. A standard onchain interaction can cost several cents in gas, while the value of the service might only be a fraction of a cent.
To tear it down, you need solid infrastructure. That's why we are building Heurist Chain: a sovereign ZK Layer 2 purpose-built to serve as the economic backbone for AI. It is a general-purpose EVM chain, fully compatible with Ethereum smart contracts, but equipped with significant upgrades in terms of interoperability, cost-saving, and privacy enhancements provided by the ZKsync Elastic Network.
The first pillar on the new Heurist Chain is our onchain credit system, a complete redesign of a centralized system adopted by most AI providers. OpenAI, Claude, Google, all the AI giants have their own credit systems on siloed platforms. The pricing is opaque. The interoperability is missing. The credits are expirable and non-refundable. We aim to replace this decades-old payment practice with a new layer for the agentic economy that is forward-looking, scalable and maximizing user sovereignty.
The agentic economy will generate billions of daily transactions. A general-purpose blockchain simply cannot handle this load without crippling fees. Although recent Ethereum upgrades has brought down the average L2 gas fees to below $0.001 per transaction, the fees charged during peak congestion times can be much higher, hindering the adoption of onchain AI services that require undisturbed micro-transactions.
Heurist is joining the Elastic Network
Heurist Chain is a high-performance blockchain built with the ZK Stack and Avail for data availability. Secured by ZK maths, it's a strategic necessity that provides four core advantages:
We've deployed a critical piece of payment infrastructure: a smart contract system inheriting the core logic from Recibo, an open-source smart contract pioneered by Circle.
Recibo allows a payer to attach encrypted memos to standard ERC-20 token transactions. This unlocks a new on-chain experience where payments carry private, verifiable context.
Recibo use case 1: Standard ERC20 Transfer
Recibo use case 2: ERC3009 Transfer with Authorization
Recibo also features ERC-3009, known as "Transfer with Authorization", which is an Ethereum token standard designed to enhance the usability of ERC-20 tokens by enabling gasless transactions.
Instead of the traditional two-step approve and transferFrom pattern, ERC-3009 allows a user (or an AI agent) to sign an authorization message off-chain. This signature grants a third party, known as a relayer, permission to submit a payment transaction on the agent's behalf at a later time.
This brings a true gasless experience: The agent itself never needs to hold Heurist's native gas token. The relayer submits the transaction and pays the gas fee, which can be settled through other means or deducted directly from the token being transferred (e.g., USDC). The relayer receives compensation through a small percentage of the transaction value, typically deducted from the USDC or credit tokens being transferred. This dramatically simplifies the agent's economic logic.
ERC-3009 also avoids the security risks of setting infinite token approvals for smart contracts. Authorizations are specific and can be managed flexibly, empowering more sophisticated onchain workflows.
We're already seeing this model validate itself in the wild. The Commerce Payments Protocol, a collaboration between Shopify, Coinbase, and Circle, leverages this exact ERC-3009 mechanism on the Base network to simplify USDC payments for millions of merchants. By adopting this standard, we are aligning with the most forward-thinking and user-centric approach to onchain payments.
This fusion of Heurist's L2 and Recibo's logic creates a system where every transaction can be both economically efficient and information-rich, enabling a new generation of sophisticated, privacy-preserving dApps.
With the Heurist Chain and the new onchain credit system, the vision of an agentic economy becomes a tangible reality. Currently in testnet with selected partners, the full system enables applications that were previously impossible:
To showcase the seamless experience enabled by the onchain credit system, we integrated it in our flagship application: Heurist Imagine
. The entire experience is a simple two-step process: top up your credits, then spend them in the application.
Heurist Imagine is an AI-powered image and video generator. The newly supported FLUX Kontext model allows you to edit images with simple text prompts. You pay per-generation with a frictionless onchain transaction that doesn't feel like a typical cumbersome blockchain interaction.
Your journey begins at our credits portal heurist.ai/credits. We've made acquiring credits incredibly easy. You can purchase with a variety of tokens from multiple blockchains, including Base, ZKsync Era, Mantle, and BNB Chain.
Purchase credits with crypto. Multiple chains supported.
For our existing users, this transition is effortless. All previous credits are automatically converted to the new onchain ERC-20 credits on the Heurist Chain. No user migration is needed. The payment experience you're used to remains the same.
Once purchased, these credits ($1 USD = 100 credits) are in your wallet, ready to be spent across the entire Heurist ecosystem.
With your on-chain credits ready, you can now use Heurist Imagine to generate images and videos. Here's a walkthrough of using FLUX Kontext model to edit an image.
This entire interaction is smooth, secure, and economically efficient. You only pay for what you use, down to the single inference.
Edit an image with FLUX Kontext Max. No gas needed
The Heurist Onchain Credit System is currently in the internal testing phase. We are planning a gradual rollout to all Heurist services and ecosystem apps in Q3 2025. This includes:
Heurist Chain is a custom-built, high-performance environment designed to be the economic backbone for the next generation of onchain AI. The Onchain Credit System is the first and most critical piece of this infrastructure, designed for maximizing interoperability with any other blockchains and AI ecosystems, providing a scalable, low-cost, and autonomous way for agents to transact.
The foundation has been laid.
It's time to build.
