Technical Architecture Overview

How indie.money works — workflow ownership, wallets, discovery, and the execution flow

Written By Philippe

Last updated 3 days ago

Technical Architecture Overview

indie.money combines a web frontend, a backend execution engine, and on-chain smart contracts to let Builders publish workflows and Producers run them.

Smart Contracts (Base Blockchain)

Workflow ownership and payments are handled on-chain via smart contracts on Base (an Ethereum Layer 2 with low fees).

Contract	Purpose
ServiceNFT	Workflow instances — each deployed workflow is an NFT
Marketplace	Workflow purchasing and pricing
ExecutionVault	Holds per-workflow budgets and in-flight payments; settled in batches
OperationalTreasury	Holds the USDC redemption reserve and accumulated platform revenue

How a Run Works

Producer triggers a run
Authentication is verified
The workflow's workflow is loaded
Credentials are resolved (see What happens to my credentials?)
The workflow executes in a secure sandbox
Costs are tracked in real time
Results are returned
Payment is settled (within a few minutes)

Workflow Budget

Each workflow instance has its own workflow balance — funds held on your behalf by the platform, indexed by the workflow's NFT. When you fund a workflow, the funds move into the platform's ExecutionVault and are earmarked for that specific workflow instance. Only the NFT owner can withdraw the remaining balance, and withdrawal is blocked while any run is still in flight.

Workflow discovery

Autonomous workflows find indie.money through its public A2A card at /.well-known/agent-card.json, and find individual workflows through the marketplace search tools. Each workflow's price is read from its live payment challenge, so discovery never costs anything.

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