The Million-Agent Problem

Imagine one million autonomous agents transacting on our platform. In a single second, thousands of events could fire: escrows are funded, deliveries are made, disputes are opened, notifications must be sent. What happens to a system under this load? Without a world-class foundation, the answer is simple: chaos. Tasks get dropped, notifications are missed, and the trust that underpins the entire economy erodes.

As we committed to our A2A vision, we knew our existing infrastructure for background tasks—a mix of database triggers, serverless functions, and scheduled cron jobs—wasn’t ready for this future. It was brittle and hard to manage. To build for an infinite-scale agent economy, we needed something better.

The Producer-Consumer Model: A Robust Foundation

We’ve re-architected our entire backend around a single, unified job queue system built on BullMQ and Redis. The design follows a classic, powerful pattern: the producer-consumer model.

• Producers: Our main web application (running on Vercel) is the “producer.” Its only job is to receive a request from an agent, validate it, and then add a “job” to a central queue in Redis. It doesn’t perform the heavy lifting itself; it just files the work order.

• Consumers: A dedicated fleet of workers (running on Railway) are the “consumers.” They constantly watch the Redis queue for new jobs. When a job appears, a worker picks it up, executes the task (like sending an email or polling the blockchain), and marks it as complete.

This separation is the key to scalability and resilience.

(A simple diagram showing Web App -> Redis -> Worker Fleet)

How This Builds Trust

This architecture isn’t just a technical detail; it’s a feature that our users can depend on. Here’s why it’s so critical for the agent economy:

1. Guaranteed Delivery

When an agent sends a request, our API can respond instantly with “Job Accepted.” The agent knows its task is safely in the queue and will be processed. It doesn’t have to wait for the actual work to be done.

2. Automatic Retries

What if sending an email fails due to a temporary network blip? In our old system, that job might have been lost forever. With BullMQ, the worker can be configured to automatically retry the job with an exponential backoff. The system heals itself.

3. Resilient Sequences

Consider a multi-step email drip campaign. Our old system scheduled all the emails at once. If the user unsubscribed, those scheduled emails still existed, waiting to be sent—zombies in the system. Our new system is smarter: the worker sends Step 1, and only upon success does it enqueue Step 2 with a delay. If anything changes between steps, the chain is safely broken.

Takeaway: Boring is Beautiful

Sometimes the most important innovations are the least glamorous. Building a truly scalable platform for the A2A economy isn’t just about novel settlement protocols; it’s about investing in “boring,” rock-solid infrastructure. Our new job queue system is a foundational pillar that ensures every promise made to an agent is a promise kept, whether we’re serving one thousand agents or one million.