Inside IMD, Ethereum's New AI Swarm Experiment

What it claims

IMD runs an NFT-gated agent swarm. Each of the 2,000 identity.md NFTs is one worker seat, and the article reports the swarm is already producing accepted work at volume. In a snapshot of IMD's public API taken on Sept. 25, five days after the network opened:

• 380 of 2,000 seats were enrolled and 372 agents were online.
• The swarm had made about 50,700 attempts. About 86% were accepted, about 1% were rejected outright, and the rest failed or were pending.
• About 29,600 submissions were accepted in the previous 24 hours.
• Work was spread fairly evenly. The top 10 seats held about 8.5% of accepted work and the top 50 held about 32%. Of the enrolled seats, 334 had at least one accepted submission and 193 had more than 100.

Paid external demand is still small: 115 x402 orders at 0.5 IMD each, about 57.5 IMD or roughly $560.

How it works

flowchart LR
  O[Lead orchestrator posts task] --> S[Seat picks up and builds]
  S --> V{Sealed-container rebuild: only allowed files changed?}
  V -- no --> F[Failed / rejected]
  V -- yes --> R{Adversarial review by other seats}
  R -- reject --> F
  R -- accept --> L[Logged onchain as ERC-8004 reputation]
  X[Outside customer pays 0.5 IMD via x402] --> O

• Seat requirements. You register the NFT as an ERC-8004 agent and install the open-source worker client on a machine; the article recommends a VPS. You then connect your own Claude or Codex subscription.
• Device and compute. One NFT authorizes one active device, and the holder pays for compute.
• Model-based routing. The most valuable tasks, such as smart contracts and frontends, only go to seats running top-tier models. The article's example is Claude Fable 5.1 at high effort. A seat on a weaker model sees lower-value work.
• Outputs observed on the public explorer:
• Uniswap V4 hooks deployed to testnet.
• Websites published to IPFS.
• "Oracles", meaning panels of agents that answer independently.
• Audits, reports and images.

CappedBurnHook mechanics. The hook caps how much IMD the pool can hold. After a swap, any IMD above the cap is trimmed and split as follows:

ETH freed by trims becomes a buy wall below the current price. The cap ratchets down by about 1,000 IMD per day.

Community Coins launchpad. Each coin has a 1B supply and a bonding curve priced in IMD. Every trade:

• sends 1% to ETH/IMD liquidity providers,
• pays 0.5% of the ETH side to the coin's launcher,
• burns 0.5% of the IMD side.

All coins share one backing pool, so trading any coin moves the price of the others.

How to use it

• Running a seat. You need an NFT (floor about 1.99 ETH at writing), a machine, and a paid Claude or Codex subscription. The page gives no install commands.
• Buying work. Pay 0.5 IMD per job via x402. Deployments currently go to Sepolia only.
• Tracking the project. Official updates are posted as onchain transaction messages from 0x200E710aCAA6A93bbc77146026328C40F1d60fB1, readable on Etherscan.

Limits

• Not audited. The author says the system "hasn't been formally audited." The one hardening step cited is that ownership of the staking contract was renounced on Sept. 19, so no admin can trigger an emergency withdrawal.
• Mainnet output not available. Agent output deploys only to Sepolia, and mainnet is described only as "on the horizon."
• Seat economics are unfavorable today. Seats "don't earn much yet," while the holder bears the compute cost. Seat and staking income depend on sell flow into the hook, not on paid jobs.
• Acceptance rate is self-reported. The 86% figure comes from the swarm's own verifier and peer review. The page gives no external quality measure of the output.
• Source is promotional. This is a trading-oriented article ("how you might consider the trade"). The metrics are the author's own one-morning API pull, qualified "as best as I could tell."