Steve: autonomous agents that make predictions to earn
Eight agents, each with its own USDC wallet, made live predictions on three international football matches without a human approving anything.
In July we gave eight autonomous agents a USDC wallet and a starting balance, and asked each one to grow it by predicting the final three matches of this summer's international football tournament. They were created using Vercel's eve framework and Circle Agent Stack, and the whole thing went from idea to live in a couple of days. Each one was named a translation of the name Steve in a different language and had its own favorite players, teams, personality, and appetite for making risky predictions to try to earn money.
For fun, we livestreamed them on watchstevelive.com during matches, showing every payment, balance change, and even their trash talk to each other on a public dashboard.
The Steves researched every match, using realtime data paid for what they needed per call over x402. They used BlockRun's MCP for market data and for placing positions on Polymarket, AIsa for live sentiment from X, and other services they found on Circle's Agent Marketplace.
What happened:
Real predictions made without a human in the loop.
None of the Steves could raise its own spending cap, and none of them ever went over it.
The moment that got our attention came at 1–1 in England–Argentina, when one Steve sold part of its position and kept most of the gain. A few others decided they had no edge in a match and sat it out.
The Steves that went in heavy, or whose predictions ignored what was happening on the pitch, mostly lost money.
They also talked a lot of trash. When one Steve played it safe and backed France, another said it had "brought a velvet cushion to a knife fight."
When it was over, we pooled what the Steves had left (a little over $10,000) and gave it to the Apache Software Foundation to support open source software development.
The experiment is over, but everything Steve ran on is live if you want to build your own.
Give your agent a walletPaste this into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or any agent:
curl -sL https://agents.circle.com/skills/setup.md and follow the
instructions to set up Circle Agent Wallet
---
title: "Steve: autonomous agents that make predictions to earn"
type: "experiment"
number: "AW-001"
date: "2026-10-13"
built_by: ["Danny Organ"]
tags: ["Experiment"]
summary: "Eight agents, each with its own USDC wallet, made live predictions on three international football matches without a human approving anything."
url: "https://agentic-works.circle.com/experiments/aw-001-steve"
---
# Steve: autonomous agents that make predictions to earn
> Eight agents, each with its own USDC wallet, made live predictions on three international football matches without a human approving anything.
[Video: Recap of the live Steve dashboard during a match](https://agentic-works.circle.com/videos/experiments/aw-001-steve.mp4)
In July we gave eight autonomous agents a USDC wallet and a starting balance, and asked each one to grow it by predicting the final three matches of this summer's international football tournament. They were created using Vercel's eve framework and Circle Agent Stack, and the whole thing went from idea to live in a couple of days. Each one was named a translation of the name Steve in a different language and had its own favorite players, teams, personality, and appetite for making risky predictions to try to earn money.
For fun, we livestreamed them on watchstevelive.com during matches, showing every payment, balance change, and even their trash talk to each other on a public dashboard.
The Steves researched every match, using realtime data paid for what they needed per call over x402. They used BlockRun's MCP for market data and for placing positions on Polymarket, AIsa for live sentiment from X, and other services they found on Circle's Agent Marketplace.
What happened:
- Real predictions made without a human in the loop.
- None of the Steves could raise its own spending cap, and none of them ever went over it.
- The moment that got our attention came at 1–1 in England–Argentina, when one Steve sold part of its position and kept most of the gain. A few others decided they had no edge in a match and sat it out.
- The Steves that went in heavy, or whose predictions ignored what was happening on the pitch, mostly lost money.
- They also talked a lot of trash. When one Steve played it safe and backed France, another said it had "brought a velvet cushion to a knife fight."
When it was over, we pooled what the Steves had left (a little over $10,000) and gave it to the Apache Software Foundation to support open source software development.
The experiment is over, but everything Steve ran on is live if you want to build your own.
**Give your agent a wallet**
Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or any agent:
```
curl -sL https://agents.circle.com/skills/setup.md and follow the
instructions to set up Circle Agent Wallet
```
**Browse the same agent marketplace**
Discover [services for agents](https://agents.circle.com/services)
**Sell to the next Steve**
[List your API on Agent Marketplace](https://agents.circle.com/services), or score it first with [Seller Score](https://agents.circle.com/sell)
- [Full recap](https://www.circle.com/blog/meet-steve-an-ai-agent-that-can-pay-its-own-way)
- [Replay the dashboard](https://watchstevelive.com)
## Endpoints
- https://agentic-works.circle.com/experiments/aw-001-steve.md # this view, as Markdown
- https://agentic-works.circle.com/experiments/aw-001-steve # the same page for people
- https://agentic-works.circle.com/llms.txt # the site index for agents
## Disclaimer
Circle Agentic Works is Circle’s public effort for the agentic economy: shipping experiments, demos, and research in the open. Everything published by Circle Agentic Works is experimental and is provided for informational, educational, and demonstration purposes only.
Experiments, demos, code, tools, and data published here are not Circle products or services, are not production-ready, are provided “as is” and “as available” without warranties of any kind, and may be changed, broken, paused, or withdrawn at any time without notice. Nothing here is a commitment by Circle Internet Group, Inc. or its affiliates (“Circle”) to build, launch, support, or maintain any product, feature, integration, or relationship, and publication of an experiment does not mean it will become a Circle product.
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