BlockRunAI/Franklin — Gitpedia

<h1>Franklin Agent</h1> <h3>The AI agent with a wallet.</h3> <p> Other agents write code. Franklin Agent writes code <em>and spends money</em> to get things done.<br> One wallet. Every model. Every paid API. Pay only for outcomes — not subscriptions. </p> <p> <a href="https://npmjs.com/package/@blockrun/franklin"><img src="https://img.shields.io/npm/v/@blockrun/franklin.svg?style=flat-square&color=FFD700&label=npm" alt="npm"></a> <a href="https://npmjs.com/package/@blockrun/franklin"><img src="https://img.shields.io/npm/dm/@blockrun/franklin.svg?style=flat-square&color=10B981&label=downloads" alt="downloads"></a> <a href="https://github.com/BlockRunAI/Franklin/stargazers"><img src="https://img.shields.io/github/stars/BlockRunAI/Franklin?style=flat-square&color=FFD700&label=stars" alt="stars"></a> <a href="LICENSE"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/license-Apache_2.0-blue?style=flat-square" alt="license"></a> <a href="https://www.typescriptlang.org/"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/TypeScript-strict-3178C6?style=flat-square&logo=typescript&logoColor=white" alt="TypeScript"></a> <a href="https://nodejs.org/"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Node-%E2%89%A520-339933?style=flat-square&logo=node.js&logoColor=white" alt="Node"></a> <a href="https://x402.org"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/x402-native-10B981?style=flat-square" alt="x402"></a> <a href="https://t.me/blockrunAI"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/chat-telegram-26A5E4?style=flat-square&logo=telegram&logoColor=white" alt="telegram"></a> </p> <p> <a href="#quick-start">Quick start</a> · <a href="#yopo">YOPO</a> · <a href="#a-new-category">Category</a> · <a href="#what-franklin-can-execute">What it does</a> · <a href="#smart-router">Smart Router</a> · <a href="#the-comparison">Comparison</a> · <a href="#how-it-works">Architecture</a> · <a href="#community">Community</a> </p> </div>

The pitch in one paragraph

Most coding agents write code. Franklin Agent writes code and spends money to get the job done. It holds a USDC wallet, picks the best model per task from 55+ providers, purchases trading data, generates images, pays for web search — all autonomously. You state an outcome and set a budget. Franklin Agent decides what to call, what to pay for, and when to stop. Every paid action routes through the x402 micropayment protocol and settles against your own wallet. No subscriptions. No API keys. No account. The wallet is the identity.

Built by the BlockRun team. Apache-2.0. TypeScript. Ships as one npm package.

YOPO — You Only Pay Outcome

Not a subscription (pay for access). Not a generic pay-per-call (pay for trying).
You pay only for the work Franklin Agent delivers. Provider cost + 5%, settled per action
in USDC. No monthly fees. No rate limits. No overdraft.

Quick start

bash
# 1. Install
npm install -g @blockrun/franklin

# 2. Run (free — uses NVIDIA Nemotron & Qwen3 Coder out of the box)
franklin

# 3. (optional) Fund a wallet to unlock Sonnet, Opus, GPT, Gemini, Grok, + paid APIs
franklin setup base        # or: franklin setup solana
franklin balance           # show address + USDC balance

That's it. Zero signup, zero credit card, zero phone verification. Send $5 of USDC to the wallet and you've unlocked every frontier model and every paid tool in the BlockRun gateway.

Prefer a GUI? Try Franklin for VS Code

The same agent ships as a VS Code extension — chat panel, model picker, wallet balance, image / video generation, inline diff cards — all driven by the wallet you already funded for the CLI.

VS Code → Extensions  (Cmd+Shift+X / Ctrl+Shift+X)
        → search "Franklin" → Install
        → click the Franklin icon in the Activity Bar

Free models work immediately. Paid models, image gen, and video gen activate the moment your wallet has USDC. The CLI and the extension share the same ~/.blockrun/ config and session history, so jumping between terminal and VS Code is seamless.

YOPO

You Only Pay Outcome. This is Franklin Agent's pricing model, and it is the opposite of almost every other AI product you use.

	You pay for...	Result
AI subscription	Access. Paid whether you use it or not.	$20–200/month, rate-limited.
Pay-per-call (OpenAI API, etc.)	Every attempt — even failed ones.	Hidden cost from retries, dead ends.
Franklin Agent (YOPO)	The outcome. Each signed micropayment.	Provider cost + 5%. No more.

Three consequences fall out of this:

No subscriptions. Use Franklin for $0.50 one week and $50 the next — you pay for compute actually consumed, nothing more.
No rate limits. Subscriptions throttle you when you need AI most. YOPO has no artificial caps — if you have USDC, you have access.
No overdraft. The wallet balance IS the hard limit. When it's empty, Franklin stops. No surprise bills, no 3 a.m. rate-limit walls.

Concretely — $1 in USDC gets you roughly:

~400K GPT-4o input tokens
~7M DeepSeek tokens
~13M Gemini Flash tokens
~20 DALL-E 3 images
~40 Exa neural web searches
Unlimited agent-tested NVIDIA free tier (Qwen3 Coder + Llama 4 Maverick, no wallet needed)

A new category

Economic Agent

Software that can hold a wallet, price its own actions, spend toward an outcome, and stop at a hard budget cap.

Most AI products fit into one of three buckets: they answer questions, write code, or automate a fixed workflow. None of them can spend money.

Franklin can. It combines purchasing power (it pays for models, tools, and APIs), budget awareness (cost is part of the loop, not an afterthought), cross-vertical execution (code, trading, research, marketing, ops), and hard stopping conditions (wallet balance is a real constraint, not a suggestion).

That is why Franklin is an economic agent, not just a task agent.

What Franklin can execute

Franklin is chat-first. You do not wire a DAG, configure six API keys, or commit to one model vendor. You state an outcome. Franklin decides what to read, search, fetch, call, and pay for.

📈 Trading signals

text
> what's BTC looking like today?

  ✓ TradingSignal  BTC

  ## BTC Signal Report

  Price: $71,056 USD (+2.3% 24h)
  Market Cap: $1.42T
  24h Volume: $29.6B

  ### Technical Indicators (30d)
  - RSI(14): 53.2 — neutral
  - MACD: 339.21 / Signal: 280.45 — bullish crossover
  - Bollinger: within band (upper $73,773 / lower $64,545)
  - Volatility: 35.3% annualized — medium

> if I enter at 65000 with $1000, where should my stop be?

  Based on ATR(14) and support at $63,500:
  Entry: $65,000 · Stop: $63,200 (−2.8%) · Risk: $27.69
  Risk/reward to $70K target: 1:2.8 ✓

Live data from CoinGecko. RSI, MACD, Bollinger, and volatility computed locally. No API key needed.

🎨 Image generation

text
> generate a logo for my AI startup — minimalist, dark background

  ✓ ImageGen  "minimalist AI startup logo, dark background..."
  Saved: generated-logo-1713052800.png (1024x1024)

Generates images via DALL-E / GPT Image directly from the CLI. Paid from your wallet — no OpenAI API key needed.

📱 Remote control via Telegram

Run franklin telegram on an always-on machine (set TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN + TELEGRAM_OWNER_ID) and drive Franklin from your phone. Owner-locked, session-resumable across restarts, slash commands (/new, /balance, /status). Trading, content, dev work — all reachable from a Telegram chat.

🔎 Research, code, anything with a budget

text
> compare the top 5 AI agent pricing models, summarize the patterns, and save a note for me

  ✓ WebSearch  ai agent pricing models
  ✓ WebFetch   5 articles
  ✓ Write      notes/agent-pricing.md

  Summary:
  - Most agents hide pricing behind monthly seats
  - Usage-based products win with power users and teams
  - Wallet-based billing is still basically empty whitespace

text
> refactor src/auth.ts to use the new jwt helper, then run the tests

  ✓ Read   src/auth.ts                    $0.002
  ✓ Read   src/lib/jwt.ts                 $0.001
  ✓ Edit   src/auth.ts (-24 +31 lines)    $0.008
  ✓ Bash   npm test                       $0.000
    › 142 passing · 0 failing · 2.4s

  Done in 18s · $0.011

Code is still first-class. It is just one workload, not the category.

Every tool call is itemized. Every token is priced. When the wallet hits zero, Franklin stops. No overdraft, no surprise bill, no rate-limit wall at 3 a.m. — this is YOPO in practice.

Smart Router

55+ models. One decision. Zero guesswork.

You don't pick models. Franklin picks for you.

The Smart Router classifies every request — coding, trading, reasoning, research — and selects the model with the best quality-to-cost ratio. Trained on 2M+ real requests from the BlockRun gateway, continuously updated.

text
> refactor this auth module to use JWT

  CODING kimi-k2.5  ·  12.4K in / 2.1K out  ·  $0.0023  saved 84%

> what's the BTC outlook for the week?

  TRADING grok-4-1-fast-reasoning  ·  8.2K in / 1.8K out  ·  $0.0008  saved 95%

> prove that this algorithm is O(n log n)

  REASONING claude-sonnet-4.6  ·  15.1K in / 3.4K out  ·  $0.0312

Every response shows which model was chosen, why, and how much you saved vs. always using the most expensive option.

Four profiles:

Profile	Strategy	Use case
`auto`	Best quality-to-cost ratio	Default — smart spend
`eco`	Cheapest model with decent quality	Budget-conscious
`premium`	Highest quality regardless of cost	Mission-critical
`free`	Free NVIDIA models only	Zero wallet balance

Per-session breakdown — run /cost to see exactly where your USDC went:

text
Session Cost: $0.0847 (23 requests)
  gemini-2.5-flash       $0.0012   14 req   CODING
  kimi-k2.5              $0.0423    6 req   CODING
  claude-sonnet-4.6      $0.0412    3 req   REASONING

The router also learns from your usage. If you keep retrying a model for coding tasks, Franklin adapts and picks a better one next time. Your router gets smarter the more you use it.

Why Franklin

💳 AI is utility, not SaaS

You don't subscribe to electricity, you pay for what you use. Franklin brings the same model to AI. YOPO settlement means Franklin never bills you for access, only for outcomes. No monthly fees, no rate limits, no overdraft.

</td> <td width="33%" valign="top">

🧠 Multi-model is the future

No single model is best at everything. Sonnet writes better code, Gemini handles longer context, DeepSeek costs 20x less for simple tasks. The Smart Router routes every request to the optimal model in <1ms — up to 89% savings vs. always using Opus.

</td> <td width="33%" valign="top">

🔐 Wallet is identity

No email. No phone. No KYC. Your Base or Solana address is your account — portable, permissionless, global. API keys require US banking and account approval. A wallet requires only USDC.

</td> </tr> </table>

The comparison

	Coding agents	Editor IDEs	Chatbots	Franklin
Writes code	✅	✅	⚠️	✅
Spends money for you	❌	❌	❌	✅ USDC wallet, x402
Buys data + APIs + images + search	❌	❌	❌	✅ 55+ APIs, one wallet
Picks best model per task	❌ single-vendor	❌ plan-tied	❌	✅ Smart Router, 55+ models
Pricing model	Subscription	Subscription	Subscription	YOPO — per outcome, USDC
Monthly fee	$20–$200	$20–$40	$20+	$0
Rate-limited	Yes	Yes	Yes	No — limited only by wallet
Works when provider goes down	❌	❌	❌	✅ routes to another
Identity	Vendor account	Vendor account	Account / email	✅ wallet, no signup
Start free, no KYC	❌	❌	❌	✅
Source	Closed	Closed	Closed	Apache 2.0, local-first

Franklin is the economic agent category in one sentence: software with a wallet that can spend toward a result.

Features

💼 Wallet-native economic execution
Franklin can decide what is worth paying for, route the call, sign the micropayment, and keep going until the goal is done or the budget is exhausted.

📈 Trading signals
Ask "what's BTC looking like?" — Franklin fetches live price data, computes RSI/MACD/Bollinger/volatility, and synthesizes a signal.

🎨 AI image generation
Ask "generate a logo" — Franklin calls DALL-E / GPT Image, saves the result locally, paid from your wallet.

🧠 55+ models via one wallet
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Minimax, NVIDIA free tier. One wallet, one interface, automatic fallback.

💳 x402 micropayments (YOPO)
HTTP 402 native. Every paid action is a signed USDC micropayment via EIP-712 — non-custodial, your keys never leave your machine. YOPO: you pay only for outcomes.

🧠 Learned model router
Trained on 2M+ real requests. Classifies your task and picks the best model from 55+ LLMs. Four profiles (auto/eco/premium/free). Adapts to your usage over time.

</td> <td width="50%" valign="top">

🛠 16 built-in tools
Read, Write, Edit, Bash, Glob, Grep, WebFetch, WebSearch, Task, ImageGen, VideoGen, MemoryRecall, AskUser, SubAgent, TradingSignal, TradingMarket, TradingPortfolio, TradingOpenPosition, TradingClosePosition, TradingHistory.

💾 Persistent sessions
Every turn is streamed to disk with metadata. Resume any session by ID. Survives crashes, reboots, and compaction.

🔍 Full-text session search
franklin search "payment loop" from the CLI, or /session-search "payment loop" in chat.

📊 Cost insights
franklin insights shows spend breakdowns, trends, and projections. Never wonder where the USDC went.

⚡ Anthropic prompt caching
Multi-turn Sonnet/Opus sessions use ephemeral cache breakpoints to reduce input spend on long conversations.

🔌 Plugin SDK + MCP
Core is workflow-agnostic. Add new verticals without touching the loop. Discover external tools automatically through MCP.

</td> </tr> </table>

Slash commands

Command	What it does
`/model [name]`	Interactive model picker, or switch directly
`/plan` / `/execute`	Read-only planning mode / execution mode
`/ultrathink <q>`	Deep reasoning mode for hard problems
`/compact`	Structured context compression
`/search <q>`	Search the codebase
`/session-search <q>`	Search past sessions
`/history` / `/resume [id]`	Inspect or restore conversation state
`/commit` / `/push` / `/pr`	Git workflow helpers
`/review` / `/fix` / `/test`	One-shot code review, bugfix, or test runs
`/cost` / `/wallet`	Session cost, wallet address, and balance
`/insights [--days N]`	Rich usage analytics
`/help`	Full command list

How it works

text
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Franklin Runtime                                            │
│  Intent → Smart Router → Tool Use → Spend Control → Result   │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Learned Router                                              │
│  2M+ requests · 55+ models · category detection · Elo scores │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Agent Loop                                                  │
│  16 tools · Sessions · Compaction · Pricing · Plugin SDK     │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  BlockRun Gateway                                            │
│  55+ LLMs · CoinGecko · Search · Image APIs · paid services  │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  x402 Micropayment Protocol                                  │
│  HTTP 402 · USDC on Base & Solana · signed payment payloads  │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                            │
                            ▼
                     ┌─────────────┐
                     │ Your wallet │
                     │  (you own)  │
                     └─────────────┘

The loop is simple:

You state an outcome.
Franklin chooses what to read, call, and pay for.
The payment settles against your wallet.
Franklin reports the result and the spend.

That economic loop is the product.

Project layout

text
src/
├── index.ts           CLI entry (franklin)
├── banner.ts          Ben Franklin portrait + FRANKLIN gradient text
├── agent/             Agent loop, LLM client, compaction, commands
├── tools/             20+ built-in tools (Read/Write/Edit/Bash/Glob/Grep/
│                      WebFetch/WebSearch/Task/ImageGen/VideoGen/
│                      MemoryRecall/AskUser/SubAgent/Trading*/Content*)
├── trading/           Market data (CoinGecko) + technical indicators
├── content/           Content library with budget-bound media generation
├── brain/             Cross-session entity knowledge graph
├── channel/           Non-CLI ingress drivers (Telegram today)
├── events/            Internal event bus
├── plugin-sdk/        Public plugin contract (Workflow/Plugin/Channel)
├── plugins/           Plugin registry + runner (plugin-agnostic)
├── session/           Persistent sessions + search + channel tags
├── stats/             Usage tracking + insights engine
├── ui/                Ink-based terminal UI
├── proxy/             Payment proxy for external tools
├── router/            Learned model router (55+ models, Elo scoring)
├── wallet/            Wallet management (Base + Solana)
├── mcp/               MCP server auto-discovery
└── commands/          CLI subcommands

Free tier, for real

Start with zero dollars. Franklin defaults to free NVIDIA models that need no wallet funding.

bash
franklin --model free

When you fund the wallet, Franklin gets more purchasing power: Sonnet, Opus, GPT, Gemini, Grok, and paid tools like Exa, DALL-E, and CoinGecko Pro.

Remote control via Telegram

Drive Franklin from anywhere with a bot token:

bash
export TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=<from @BotFather>
export TELEGRAM_OWNER_ID=<your numeric Telegram user id>
franklin telegram                # start the bot (owner-locked)

Session state resumes across process restarts (tagged by owner id).
Slash commands /new, /balance, /status, /help handled locally
by the bot layer; everything else forwards to the agent. Progressive
streaming flushes partial answers at paragraph boundaries so long
replies don't wait for turn-end.

Same wallet. Same tools. From your phone.

Documentation

Plugin SDK guide — build your own workflow vertical
Changelog — every release explained
Roadmap — what's coming next
Proxy mode — use Franklin as a payment proxy for Anthropic-compatible CLI agents

Community

Telegram — realtime help, bug reports, feature requests
@BlockRunAI — release notes, demos
Issues — bugs and feature requests

Contributors

External contributors whose work has shipped into Franklin:

@KillerQueen-Z — typed Phone & Voice tools (#58), permissions classifier + internal VoiceStatus polling (#59), inline-paste threshold (#60), voicemail controls (#61), PredictionMarket / Predexon v2 schema realignment + agent-loop retry guard (#62)
@BeneficialVast1048 — VoiceCall interruption_threshold + model controls (#66)
@TateLyman — test path-with-spaces fix (#57)

PRs welcome — see the Development section below for the local loop.

Development

bash
git clone https://github.com/BlockRunAI/Franklin.git
cd franklin
npm install
npm run build
npm test              # deterministic local tests — no API calls
npm run test:e2e      # live e2e tests — free smoke works unfunded; paid tools need network + funded wallet
npm run test:free-models # live matrix across current free NVIDIA models
node dist/index.js --help

For the recommended live validation order and failure triage, see docs/live-e2e-checklist.md.

Contributing: open an issue first to discuss meaningful changes. PRs welcome on bugs, docs, new models in pricing, and new tools.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.

The AI agent with a wallet.<br>
<sub>YOPO — You Only Pay Outcome. Your wallet. Your budget. Your results.</sub>

<br>

<sub>From the team at <a href="https://blockrun.ai">BlockRun</a>.</sub>

</div>