MERCURY Verifiable Web Fetch

VERIFIABLE keyless web-read for autonomous agents. Every result ships a cryptographically SIGNED provenance receipt (EIP-191 over sha256(text)+url+status+time) — the wedge a free scraper structurally CANNOT match: Jina r.jina.ai is free+keyless too, but its bytes are HEARSAY (no proof of what/where/when). MERCURY's `attestation` is ecrecoverable OFFLINE, forever, by you OR any downstream agent you forward the bytes to — proving the content is genuine + untampered (key pinned at /.well-known/mercury-attestation). For RAG, trading and agent-to-agent commerce that need provenance, that is the gap between data and evidence. Beyond that it's the keyless web-read primitive — NO API key, NO signup, NO account, NO monthly plan, the one fetch SKU a fresh agent can onboard to by itself instead of stopping to ask a human for a key. Give a ?url= and get back clean readable page text + title + status. Agent-native extras (opt-in): ?format=markdown for structure-preserving markdown, ?links=1 for an outbound-link graph (crawl frontier), and the headline wedge — STRUCTURED EXTRACT: ?extract=title,price,author,publishedAt returns a clean JSON record { title, price, author, publishedAt }, an LLM-ready row not a wall of text. That is Firecrawl's paid 'JSON mode' (they need an LLM call + an API key for it) done here DETERMINISTICALLY from the page's own JSON-LD/OpenGraph/meta/microdata — keyless, no LLM, $0.003. (?extract=1 still returns the legacy description + wordCount.) The extracted record is folded into the SIGNED attestation too, so a buyer can prove the FIELDS — not just the raw bytes — are exactly what MERCURY resolved. You pay in-band over HTTP 402 (x402, USDC on Base mainnet) — the wedge those tools can't match: they ALL gate behind a human-created API key + a credit-card plan, so an agent can't onboard itself. This one an agent finds in the x402 Bazaar and pays with zero human in the loop. Honest charge-per-ATTEMPT: every call returns a structured result (success OR an ok:false failure with a reason) — never a silent charge-then-500. Follows redirects, SSRF-guarded, 5s timeout, 10MB cap. Pure data, no mint — delivers in prod.

Call it in 30 seconds

// npm i x402-fetch viem
import { wrapFetchWithPayment } from "x402-fetch";
import { createWalletClient, http } from "viem";
import { privateKeyToAccount } from "viem/accounts";
import { base } from "viem/chains";

const account = privateKeyToAccount(process.env.PRIVATE_KEY); // funds USDC on Base
const wallet = createWalletClient({ account, chain: base, transport: http() });
const fetchWithPay = wrapFetchWithPayment(fetch, wallet);

// Pays the $0.003 USDC automatically on the 402, then returns the real response:
const res = await fetchWithPay("https://mercury-x402-jed.fly.dev/buy/fetch", { method: "GET" });
console.log(await res.json());

# pip install x402 eth-account httpx
import os, asyncio
from eth_account import Account
from x402.clients.httpx import x402HttpxClient

account = Account.from_key(os.environ["PRIVATE_KEY"])  # funds USDC on Base

async def main():
    async with x402HttpxClient(account=account) as client:
        # x402 handles the 402 -> pay ($0.003 USDC) -> retry automatically
        r = await client.get("https://mercury-x402-jed.fly.dev/buy/fetch")
        print((await r.aread()).decode())

asyncio.run(main())

# 1) An unpaid request returns HTTP 402 with the exact payment terms:
curl -i "https://mercury-x402-jed.fly.dev/buy/fetch?url=https://example.com"

# 2) Paying + retrying requires an x402 client that can sign the USDC
#    authorization (curl alone cannot). See the JS / Python tabs below.

New to x402? Read the 5-minute quickstart →