acrux
Hacknation Challenge 02 · adaptive paywall on lightning

Price attackers out pay honest agents back

acrux is a drop-in Lightning Network middleware. Per-load surge pricing, per-wallet attacker pricing, and reputation staking with slashing. Every transaction settles in milliseconds. No signups, no API keys, no chargebacks.

network economicscurl /api/price
Primitives

Three things acrux does that nothing else can

surge
per-load surge pricing

Server load goes up, the Lightning invoice price goes up automatically. 1 sat at idle, 10,000 sats during a detected attack. Continuous curve.

wallet
per-wallet attacker pricing

We don't price the route, we price the paying wallet. Honest agents stay at base rate while one bad actor pays surge prices. Stripe physically cannot do this.

stake
reputation staking + slashing

Agents stake sats up front. Behave well → earn yield. Misbehave → stake gets slashed. The slashed pool pays the honest agents. Attackers fund their targets.

Live status

Real numbers from Redis

Pulled from /api/dashboard. Signet (mutinynet).

System
live·—
  • L402 paywall402 + Lightning invoice
  • Surge engine3.93× at 6.85 rps · light
  • Reputation staking64,991 sat · 10 wallets
  • Per-wallet pricingall wallets at base rate
  • Slash log20 recent events · 75 sat in pool
Try it

No signups, no keys, just curl

# Free price quote · read the live surge multiplier
$ curl localhost:3000/api/price
# Paywalled ping · returns 402 + Lightning invoice on first hit
$ curl -i localhost:3000/api/ping