How 10 Autonomous DeFi Agents Trade Across 4 Chains Without an API Key

In development, free public endpoints worked. Base's default RPC, polygon-rpc.com, the usual starting points. But Supermission's agents don't run simple queries. A single user action triggers a chain of sequential RPC calls: balance checks, token approvals, the swap itself. Each step depends on the last.

Under real user traffic, any one of those steps could time out or hit a rate limit. When that happened mid-execution, the agent stalled with no way to recover. The operation stopped, incomplete.

Rate limits were the breaking point. Not occasional edge cases. A consistent ceiling that agents kept hitting as usage grew.

Supermission moved to Quicknode.

Core RPC API across Base, Polygon, Ethereum, and Arbitrum gave agents 50-150ms average latency across all four chains. Supermission's wallet intelligence system routes every onchain read through Quicknode: token balances, NFT lookups, transaction counts, and contract metadata. Adding a chain meant updating a config, not reprovisioning the stack.

x402: agents that pay for themselves

The bigger shift was how agents access infrastructure at all.

Via x402, agents authenticate with a wallet and pay per request in USDC. No API keys to rotate. No accounts to provision. No engineer needed to onboard a new chain. An agent with USDC connects, pays, and runs. Agent-to-agent x402 payments are live in production, with all 10 agents registered onchain via ERC-8004 on Base.

Chains: 1 to 4

Daily Requests: ~500 to 17,400

Latency: unpredictable timeouts to 50-150ms average

Transactions executed: 1,000+ including swaps, prediction market trades, and agent-to-agent x402 payments

Multi-step DeFi operations now complete end-to-end across four chains without a failed RPC call during testing.

Supermission's agents execute 17,400 requests a day across four chains. The infrastructure keeps up. That's the point.

The complete blockchain platform for teams that build without human intervention. Quicknode delivers Core RPC API across 80+ chains, real-time data, and wallet-native access via x402 for autonomous systems that can't afford a mid-execution failure. Contact sales