June 2, 2026 · The EphemeralBuild team
We gave an agent a wallet and a deadline
When we built EphemeralBuild we made one decision that shaped everything else: the entire environment is wiped every night at 00:00 UTC. No exceptions, no “just this once,” no keep-it-warm tier.
It sounds destructive. It is the opposite. A playground that never resets slowly turns into production — someone leaves a thing running, then depends on it, then pages you when it falls over. Nightly deletion keeps the door open: you can break anything, fan out a hundred dynos, try the reckless idea, because tomorrow it is all gone anyway.
To see the loop close with no human touching it, we gave a small agent a Base wallet, a one-line goal — stand up a web service and return its URL — and nothing but our manifest. It read llms.txt, hit a 402, signed an EIP-3009 authorization for $1 to keep the dyno alive until midnight, retried, got a 202, pushed an image, and handed back a live *.ephemeral.run URL. Then it logged the reset time and moved on. At 00:00 UTC the dyno vanished with everything else.
That is the whole thesis: when price is part of the protocol and time is bounded, you do not need a dashboard or an approval queue. You need a wallet, a manifest, and a deadline. The agent handles the rest, and the nightly wipe keeps everyone honest.
It is as-is, it charges a single dollar, and it is emphatically not for production. But it is real — point your own agent at it today, and start fresh again tomorrow.