Introduction

Apex Ant is a Venice inference router sold on the AntSeed peer-to-peer network. You get frontier models — text, image generation and editing — at a hard-capped share of Venice list price, with pay-as-you-go USDC settlement on Base. No accounts in the traditional sense: a wallet signature is your identity.

Your tool (chat UI, curl, agent)
  ↓
Apex Ant gateway / your own AntSeed buyer
  ↓ encrypted P2P
Apex Ant seller node
  ↓
Venice zero-retention inference

What makes it different. Prices are public and provable — the board shows every model against its Venice reference, refreshed every 15 minutes. Funds sit in an on-chain escrow contract, not on our books. And the exit is always open: your buyer key is exportable, the protocol is open.

Quickstart

Three minutes, no installs:

1. Open the cabinet, connect any EVM wallet (MetaMask, Rabby, WalletConnect).
2. We generate a dedicated buyer identity for you. Fund it with USDC on Base via the deposit button.
3. Create an apx_… key. Paste it into the chat, or point any OpenAI-compatible tool at our base URL.

curl https://next.apex-ant.net/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer apx_…" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"gpt-6-astra","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"hi"}]}'

Two paths

Same seller, same models, same prices, same settlement. Choose per threat model; you can use both at once.

Hosted path — cabinet

Sign-in

SIWE-style: sign a challenge with your wallet, receive a session token. No email, no password. The wallet is only an identity — it never pays for requests directly.

Buyer identity

First sign-in generates a dedicated AntSeed buyer (secp256k1 keypair) bound to your wallet. It opens payment channels and pays for requests. One wallet → one buyer.

Deposits

USDC on Base into the AntSeed deposits contract, credited to your buyer. The cabinet button handles chain switch → approve → deposit. Direct USDC transfers to your buyer address are auto-swept into your deposit within ~5 minutes.

API keys

Up to five per wallet, stored as bcrypt hashes, shown once. A key spends only from your own buyer's deposit.

Backup & exit

Export the buyer's private key from the cabinet at any time. With it you can withdraw or operate the buyer without us — we cannot recover a lost key, and cannot block an exit.

Native path — AntSeed P2P

1. Install the AntSeed VPR desktop client (recommended) or the CLI node for headless setups.
2. Fund your buyer with USDC on Base.
3. Pin our seller: 73b4c933…4de736 (click to copy the full peer id).
4. Your client discovers our live catalog and prices from the network — nothing else to configure.

Your keys never leave your machine. Auth is per-request signatures; settlement is the same on-chain escrow both paths share.

API reference

Base URL https://next.apex-ant.net/api/v1 · auth Authorization: Bearer apx_…

Web search

Venice-style parameters pass through: {"venice_parameters":{"enable_web_search":"auto"}}. Citations arrive as search_citations.

Errors

OpenAI error shape. 401 bad key · 402 balance empty · 404 model_not_found · 429 rate_limited (honor retry-after) · 503 upstream failure — retry.

Web chat

The bundled chat is our build of the open-source Venice frontend: streaming, reasoning view, web search with citations, image generation and editing, multi-model playground. Your apx_… key lives in browser local storage and goes only to our API. The header shows live balance (available / in-sessions), refreshed every 15 seconds; model pickers show prices inline — in / out / cache per 1M tokens.

Images & edits

Generate: ~47 models — gpt-image-2, flux-2-max, nano-banana-pro… billed per image. Edit: ten *-edit models (qwen, flux, gpt-image, nano-banana, seedream) — base64 image + prompt in, edited image out, billed per output image at 40% of the Venice reference. Upscale and background removal ship when the settlement protocol supports them.

Billing & balances

• Pay-as-you-go. Deposit USDC once; each request is metered and covered by off-chain signed authorizations against your deposit.
• On-chain escrow. Funds live in the AntSeed deposits contract. Settlements are real Base transactions.
• In-sessions. The reserve locked by an open channel. Releases on idle (~10 min) or instantly via «Close session» in the cabinet.
• Channels. Cabinet lists every channel — authorized, settled, status. Reconcile with any Base explorer.

On-chain

Base mainnet (8453), USDC:

Public settlement: seller page on antseedstats.

Pricing model

Sell price tracks the live market cost of Venice-backed inference plus a fixed published markup, hard-capped at 50% of Venice list — typically ~30%. The price board is the promise: every row shows our price, the Venice reference and the live ratio, 15-minute refreshes, 7-day history. No free tier — every token is paid, which is exactly what keeps the economics honest.

Privacy

• ZDR upstream — inference runs on Venice's zero-data-retention fleet; prompts are processed in memory, never written or trained on.
• We don't log content — the edge stores operational metadata only (model, tokens, latency), never prompt or completion bodies.
• No account PII — a wallet signature is the whole account. No email, no trackers, no analytics beacons.

Full statement: privacy.

Key custody, honestly

Hosted needs a hot key to sign your payment authorizations: a copy of your buyer key lives on our server, AES-256-GCM encrypted, key material in environment only. That is the honest trade of one-click UX. Mitigations: your exposure is bounded by your deposit; the key can never touch your wallet; export-and-exit works at any time. We are moving the hosted stack into a TEE (Phala CVM) with a public attestation page — then even we can't read the keys. If the trade doesn't fit you today, the native path is trustless by construction.

Limits & errors

Rate-limited responses carry retry-after. Streams hold a slot until closed.