The Agent Mesh Meets the Factory Floor

Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are building stablecoin rails so agents can transact. x402 lets an agent pay per API call. Machines should settle work the same way — and the agent buying journey (discover, evaluate, pay, use, verify) is the same for a machine as for a SaaS tool.

The problem: the agent economy stops at the factory door

A software agent can discover a tool through an A2A Agent Card, evaluate it, pay for it with x402, use it, and verify the result. None of that exists for industrial equipment. There's no Agent Card for a CNC, no standard way for an agent to pay a machine for a unit of work, no verifiable receipt that the work happened. The fastest-moving part of software — agent-to-agent commerce — has no on-ramp to the physical world.

How FoundryNet solves it

FoundryNet maps each step of the agent buying journey onto industrial equipment:

Discover — a public Agent Card and /agents page advertise capabilities the way an A2A card does for software.
Evaluate — machine-readable capability descriptions and a free tier let an agent try before it commits.
Pay — metered, per-use billing; the same per-call settlement model x402 brought to APIs, applied to machine work.
Use — 14 MCP tools to identify, normalize, automate, and read any machine in the fleet.
Verify — tamper-evident work records close the loop: the agent can prove the machine did what it paid for.

A2A Agent Cards exist for software. The equivalent for industrial equipment is a machine identity plus an attested work record — discoverable, addressable, verifiable.

Connect an agent in 60 seconds

FoundryNet Forge is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server — 14 tools over SSE, bearer-key auth. Add it to any MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, an agent framework):

claude mcp add --transport sse foundrynet \
  https://foundrynet-mcp-production.up.railway.app/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer fnet_YOUR_KEY"

Or as JSON config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "foundrynet": {
      "url": "https://foundrynet-mcp-production.up.railway.app/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer fnet_YOUR_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

Put your machines on the mesh — 50 calls, no card Read the Agent Card Explore the ecosystem ↗

The bridge, not the destination

The agent mesh is being built fast in software. The work here is the bridge to physical systems: identity so machines can be addressed, normalization so agents speak one language, attestation so work can be trusted, and MCP so any agent can reach in. Explore the wider physical-agent ecosystem on PhysicalMCP.

Frequently asked

What is the industrial agent mesh?

The agent mesh is the emerging network of AI agents that discover, transact with, and verify each other. The industrial agent mesh extends that to physical equipment: machines that can be discovered via an Agent Card, paid per unit of work, and verified through attested records.

How does x402 relate to machine work?

x402 lets agents pay per API call. The same per-use settlement model applies to machine work: an agent pays a machine for a unit of work and receives a verifiable receipt. FoundryNet provides the identity, metering, and attestation that make that loop trustworthy.

What is the machine equivalent of an A2A Agent Card?

A machine identity plus an attested work record. The identity makes the machine discoverable and addressable; the work record makes its output verifiable. FoundryNet publishes a machine-readable Agent Card and an /agents page for exactly this evaluation.