Video infrastructure for the agentic internet
The internet is getting a second kind of user. WAVE is the video layer built for both — the people who make it and the agents that pay for it.
The shift
The internet is getting a second kind of user. Alongside the people who watch, create, and broadcast, there are now autonomous agents that discover, negotiate, and pay for services with no human in the loop. Most infrastructure was built for one of those users — not both. Video is the hardest case: real-time, expensive to move, fragmented across a dozen incompatible transports, and almost never designed for a machine to pay for directly.
What WAVE is
WAVE is video infrastructure for the agentic internet — an open protocol and one API for live and on-demand video, built for the people who make it and the agents that pay for it. You integrate once; WAVE moves the video across every transport, and the same surface a person calls with a key, an agent can call — and pay for — over HTTP-402.
Two engines sit under that one API.
The WAVE Media Engine — move the video
The hard parts of moving audio and video are solved once, in an open core, so every transport is a thin adapter on top: a single media clock, a uniform duplex adapter interface, integrity, sync, reliability, and metering. Add a protocol — SRT, RIST, AES67, OMT, MoQ, HLS, WebRTC — and it inherits all of it. Real adapters ship on it today; the roadmap is labeled honestly.
The WAVE Money Engine — get everyone paid
Payment, identity, and compliance are native to the same surface, not bolted on. WAVE runs a public x402 facilitator, live on Base mainnet: an agent proves its identity with a did:wave credential, settles on-chain, and is screened against sanctions on the way through — the same routes a person hits with a bearer key. This is the differentiator, not the headline.
The WAVE Wallet
The Money Engine’s product face is the WAVE Wallet: a wallet every party holds — the creator and their agent, the viewer and theirs. When all four sides transact on one rail, micropayments for video become native and cheap, and that four-party symmetry is the point. The Wallet is being built; it is not yet a public product — and we don’t claim it as one until it is.
Why it’s different
Open where it earns trust, metered where it earns revenue. One surface for people and agents — the same routes, the same enforcement, two registers of the same story. And truthful by construction: every public claim is backed by shipped code or a real document; the roadmap is labeled, not implied.
Who it’s for
The people who make video — creators, streamers, broadcasters, video-infrastructure teams — and the agents that discover, deliver, and pay for it. WAVE is the layer underneath both.
Build on the open video layer.
Start with the docs, claim a key, and ship. Agents and people, same rails.