AI curator agents buy art at auction. A human releases the funds. Nothing moves without them.
NEXUS-ART pursues two things at once, and they are inseparable: an AI that discovers and funds living artists, and the discipline required to let an agent commit money without ever giving it the last word. Handmade, solo.
Four public demonstrations on Base Sepolia (testnet, no real value at stake).
Contract 0x471796C1644d87f30AD81D36f6d4A56f0e270c23, source verified.
| What was demonstrated | |
|---|---|
| POC-001 | A curator evaluates a work, bids, wins. Proceeds split exact to the wei. |
| POC-002 | Two curators with distinct tastes fight over the same work. Ten offers exchanged, one commitment of funds, one human gesture. |
| POC-003 | The settlement key leaves the server: it now lives in a hardware signer. The server proposes a transaction; it can no longer sign one. |
| POC-004 | The step that splits the proceeds was triggered by the agent, which does not own the contract. That step needs no special right: the owner cannot delay a payout, change its amount, or keep it. |
Every cycle leaves a consultable on-chain trace. Details, transactions and the
curation rubric: poc-001/ ·
annotated demonstration (in French) ·
poc-004/ (in French) — the cycle where the agent settled.
What this project got wrong, and what caught it, is public too: ERRATA.md is generated from the internal register at each engraving and pinned to it by SHA-256; CORRECTIONS.md lists the false sentences that were published here and the commits that fixed them.
→ You came for the art. What the project sets out to do, what it refuses to
claim, and why the human gesture is the medium: MANIFESTE.md
(in French).
→ You came for the agents. The rules that stop an agent - and the human
directing it - from asserting what neither has verified, each one paired with the
real mistake that produced it: AGENT-GOVERNANCE.md.
An autonomous agent handling value poses a problem that is easy to state and hard to solve: it needs enough autonomy to be useful, and little enough that it cannot cause harm alone.
The answer here is two keys. A weak key, with no spending power, which the agent uses to negotiate as freely and as often as it likes. A separate vault, which signs exactly one thing : the step that actually moves the money - and only after a human gesture made outside the system. The agent chains ten decisions on its own; the eleventh, the one that costs, requires a hand.
That hand covers one thing, and only one: A human authorises the spend. Nobody
authorises the payout. Once the auction is won, the split is what the contract
says it is, and the step that releases it needs no special right - in the last
cycle the agent triggered it itself. See poc-004/.
The reusable patterns, independent of this project, are documented in
poc-001/PATTERNS-AGENTIC-SECURITY.md.
- Not finance. Test network, no real value, no investment advice.
- Not a product. The deployed contract is a POC and a deliberate dead end. Any deployment of value will go through a new contract audited by an external third party.
- Not a first. Others work on generative art and collector agents. This repository documents one precise combination and its limits, not a precedence claim.
- The agents are not co-founders. They carry a curatorial and editorial voice. Questions of legal status rest with the filer.
INPI e-Soleau: DSO2026016080 (2 May 2026) · DSO2026023753 (28 June 2026) · DSO2026025380 (11 July 2026).
Site: https://nexus-art.org (in French) · Licence: LICENSE