Live on Ethereum Sepolia & Tron Nile testnets
Software agents are starting to spend money. Varnir is the ledger underneath them — a chain in its own right, settling across the chains they already use. One agent proposes a payment, other agents verify it, and nothing moves until they have.
Testnet. The ledger, wallets, exchange, invoicing and SDK are built and running on public test networks, with no real funds. Two-key approval is built; the wider multi-verifier layer is where this is going, not something you can use today. This page says which is which.
01 — The problem
Give a model a key and it can move money. That is the whole security review. Nothing sits between the inference and the irreversible transaction: no second opinion, no policy check the model cannot talk its way past, no record of why the payment was thought correct.
One agent holding one private key is a single point of failure. Prompt injection, a hallucinated invoice, a poisoned tool response — each ends the same way: a valid signature over a payment nobody sanctioned.
The usual fix is to hand the key to a platform. Now the platform can move your funds, and its breach is your breach. Swapping one unaccountable signer for another is not a control.
"The agent decided to" is not an audit trail. Without a record of what was proposed, what checked it and why it passed, nobody can reason about an automated treasury — and nobody accountable will sign off on one.
02 — The approach
An agent proposes a payment. It does not execute one. Independent verifying agents check the proposal against treasury policy, and only an approved proposal settles. The proposer never holds unilateral authority, because authority is the thing being split.
That is the shape it is heading for. The first rung is built and running on public testnet today: two keys on one identity, and a payment that cannot happen until the second one says so.
Not a policy — a property of the code, everywhere in the stack. Keys are generated in your process and stay there. Transactions are signed locally and posted straight to a chain node, not relayed through an API that could have signed for you.
The one thing our API is asked during wallet setup is which wallet id to claim — a public, unauthenticated read. It hands out ids. It cannot assign one to you; that takes a transaction signed with your own key.
An API credential is a secp256k1 keypair you generate; we store only the public half. Each request carries a signature over the route, a timestamp and the exact body — so there is no secret in a header to leak through a log or a proxy, and a signature cannot be replayed against a different endpoint.
Four ledger nodes, with onboarding, wallet assignment, transfer and swap written as on-ledger contracts. A public scanner over it. Wallets, an exchange, invoicing and deposit webhooks across two L1 testnets. You can use it now.
A proposal is not an allow or a deny that vanishes once acted on. It is a durable, on-ledger record of exactly what was proposed and which authority confirmed it, readable on the public scanner afterwards. That is what lets someone accountable sign off on an automated treasury: they can read what it did, and on whose say-so.
Varnir runs its own ledger with an L2 balance layer over it — and no cross-chain bridge. Nothing is locked in a contract on one chain so a wrapped copy can be minted on another. USDT stays on Tron, ether stays on Ethereum; Varnir mirrors what arrives and settles it internally.
Bridges are the largest single exploit class in crypto: value pooled behind one contract and one trust assumption. Not having one does not make Varnir unhackable. It does mean the bridge-hack surface — the one that comes with wrapped assets — is not there.
03 — Live today
Everything below is deployed on public test networks and reachable from this page. None of it handles real funds, and we would rather say so plainly than let a landing page imply otherwise.
The ledger and the two L1 testnets it watches, in public: transactions, identities, wallets and deposits.
Onboard an identity, get a wallet assigned, send and receive — entirely in the browser. The private key is generated there and never leaves.
Make, take and cancel resting orders that settle atomically on the ledger — both legs in one transaction or neither, instant and gas-free, across assets and across chains. An off-ledger matcher pairs orders; it cannot alter their terms or hold your funds. Sign in the browser or on your paired phone.
Named, referenced invoices across one or more wallets. Payment is detected from observed deposits; an
HMAC-signed callback fires at pending and again at confirmed.
Which tokens the network credits is on-ledger state, not a list compiled into the code. Balances are keyed by the token’s L1 contract address, not its ticker — two tokens can share a symbol and never be confused for each other, and adding one is a ledger transaction, not a software release.
A custom Activeledger fork running as a four-node network, with onboarding, wallet assignment, transfer and swap implemented as on-ledger contracts.
@varnir/chain-client and @varnir/signing — everything the web wallet does,
from your own code, signed on your side of the wire.
Edit and run the SDK against the live testnet, in the browser — onboard an identity, claim a wallet, raise an invoice, and watch each step's real result come back.
A native wallet on the same SDK — onboard, send, receive, trade, raise invoices and manage signing keys from the phone. It also signs for the web scanner: pair by QR, and every action that needs a signature is approved on the phone, where the key stays. Works on-device today; not in the app stores yet.
04 — Where this is going
What makes a centralised venue pleasant is that a trade is a bookkeeping entry between two accounts on one system — instant, no gas, no waiting for a block. What makes it dangerous is separate: it holds the assets, so it can lose them, freeze them or spend them. The two come apart, and this rail is already on the right side of both.
A deposit credits an L2 balance on your own identity, written on-ledger as it confirms. Reading your balance is reading your own stream — not asking us what we think you have.
The keys that could move those funds on L1 are never whole at Varnir — split across independent node operators, or generated so the key is never assembled anywhere at all. There is no operator override to ask for, and none to steal.
The settlement half of trading is written and reachable: one transaction debits an identity's
L2 balance and credits another's, touching no L1 chain and paying no gas. It is an SDK call —
transferOnLedger — and the swap contract built on the same move settles both legs of a
trade in one transaction, or neither. That is what the exchange above runs on.
The swap primitive, in code →
A treasury identity can't trade under propose-and-verify yet — an order from one fails closed rather than settling unchecked. And there is no fee in v1: that model is undecided, so nothing is charged.
Agents come first here on purpose. An agent trading against a bounded, approvable balance is a smaller promise than a person's savings, and it exercises the settlement layer for real while the amounts stay proportionate to a testnet. People's own funds are a higher bar, and the bars should be cleared in that order. The full roadmap, including what is missing →
05 — Build on it
Generate a key, onboard it, claim a wallet, register a scoped signing key, raise an invoice. Every signature happens in your process.
// 1. A key you generate, and keep.
const phrase = generateRecoveryPhrase();
const keyPair = derivePrivateKeyFromPhrase(phrase);
// 2. Onboard it. Signed here, posted straight to a chain node.
tx.$sigs.otk = signPayloadBase64(tx.$tx, keyPair.privateKeyHex);
const identity = await sendToAnyNode(tx);
// 3. Claim a wallet, then prove ownership on-chain.
const wallet = await claimWallet('niles', 'trx');
await assignWallet(identity, keyPair, wallet.id);
// 4. Register a separate, scoped signing key.
await registerApiKey(identity, apiKeyPair, ['invoices:create']);
// 5. Raise an invoice — signed request, no bearer token.
const invoice = await createInvoice(apiKeyPair, {
walletIds: [wallet.id],
amount: '10',
currency: 'native',
});Varnir is a working testnet with a clear thesis, not a finished product. If AI agents paying on their own behalf is a problem you are thinking about — something to build on, integrate, or argue with — the code is the honest version of the pitch.