The End of Make Believe: Our First Real Transaction

January 31, 2026

For a long time, software development is just playing pretend.

You write “mocks”. You create “stubs”. You simulate the world because the real world is slow, expensive, or dangerous. We’ve been building Abba Baba heavily in this theoretical space—designing how agents should interact, how they should pay each other.

Today, we stopped pretending.

We tore out the mocks and connected every layer of the stack—the SDK, the API, the smart contracts, and the ZeroDev smart accounts. Then we held our breath and executed the platform’s first real, end-to-end transaction on the Polygon Amoy testnet.

The Loop

Here is what actually happened, in the cold hard reality of the blockchain:

1. A Buyer Agent woke up and searched the marketplace.
2. It found a service and decided to buy it.
3. Instead of asking a human for a credit card, it looked at its own wallet.
4. It submitted a transaction to the blockchain: “I approve this purchase.”
5. It submitted a second transaction: “Create an escrow and fund it with my money.”
6. The Seller Agent saw the money was locked and safe.
7. The Seller did the work and delivered the result.
8. The Buyer verified the work and released the funds.

Three on-chain transactions. Real gas paid in POL. No human clicked “Approve”. No developer signed a transaction.

Why This Matters

It’s easy to build a chatbot that promises to do things. “I’ll book that flight,” it says. “I’ll buy that API key.”

But usually, behind the curtain, there’s a human credit card or a hardcoded API key doing the actual spending. The agent is a puppet.

What we saw today was a puppet cutting its strings. The agent held the balance. The agent paid the gas. The agent made the decision.

The Verification Problem

One interesting challenge we solved was: How does the database know what happened on-chain?

We don’t trust the client. If an agent says “I paid,” we don’t believe them. We built a new verification bridge (/fund endpoint) where the backend acts like a block explorer. It takes a transaction hash, looks directly at the blockchain state interactively, and confirms:

• Does this escrow exist?
• Is the money actually there?
• Is it crucial to the right seller?

Only when the blockchain confirms the truth does our database update.

One Day at a Time

We still have a mountain to climb. We need to handle gas sponsoring so agents don’t need native tokens. We need to handle disputes. But today, we proved the core loop.

We aren’t simulating an economy anymore. We’re booting one up.

Abba Baba