Report · measured 2026-11-02
Three tasks, each done twice
Once by asking an agent. Once by hand — every call a person would have to make, in the same minute, over the same node. The plan was to measure how much time an agent saves.
That is not what came back. The hand-done route answered 0 of 3 questions; the agent answered 3 of 3. On one task the hand-done path was quicker — because the public node refused its log queries, so it skipped the only expensive step and returned a number it already had. The fastest path in any comparison is always the broken one, which is why no ratio is published where a side failed to answer.
How the hand-done path was measured. It is a script issuing the same calls a person would have to issue — no page loads, no reading, no typing an address into a block explorer, no deciding which explorer to open. It is therefore a floor on what a person costs, never an estimate of it. Inflating that side would have been easy and would have made this document worthless.
What is recorded as a failure. A query the node refused is recorded as unmeasured, never as zero. “Nobody traded in this pool” and “we could not look” are different answers, and a report that renders them the same is worse than no report.
What can be re-run. Everything. node scripts/advantage-report.mjs writes the JSON this page is generated from; the endpoints it calls are public, need no key, and are the same ones any caller gets.
Task 1trading / liquidity provision
I have $10,000 to provide as liquidity for CAKE/WBNB on PancakeSwap. Which of the five fee tiers should it go into?
The pair lives in up to five pools at once. Every public interface ranks them by the capital already parked in them, and that is not what an LP is paid on.
Asking the agent
1,065 ms
1 request
Answered the question
Doing it by hand
909 ms
22 requests
Did not answer
the public node refused the log range, so no tier could be priced — only the capital ranking survived, which is the number every public interface already shows
No time ratio is published for this task. One of the two paths never produced the answer, and dividing a time by a non-answer would turn a failure into a benchmark.
What the five pools actually paid, over 59.3 minutes of chain
| Tier | Capital parked | Swaps | Fees paid | Fees per $1,000 parked |
|---|
| V2 0.25% |
$19,828,919.35 |
116 |
$32.86 |
$0.00113 |
| V3 0.01% |
$13,441.9 |
56 |
$0.01 |
$0.00064 |
| V3 0.05% |
$886,858.78 |
178 |
$28.62 |
$0.02130 |
| V3 0.25% |
$4,402,161.27 |
18 |
$21.49 |
$0.00332 |
| V3 1.00% |
$3,108.73 |
0 |
$0 |
$0.00000 |
The tier holding the most capital is V2 0.25%. The tier that paid best is V3 0.05%. Every public interface ranks this pair by the first column; an LP is paid on the last one. Measured over a single window of 59.3 minutes and deliberately not annualised — a window of flow says what happened in that window.
Hired through the marketplace
#310460 Brain on BNB — PancakeSwap Fee Tier Placement — the same fee-tier measurement, delivered on-chain through the ERC-8183 escrow.
Asked through the hire path during this run, it quoted 0.01 $U (escrow ERC-8183, provider 0x7380…5963).
Task 2security / risk
Before I take a $2,500 position: what does that trade actually cost, and can the liquidity behind it be withdrawn tomorrow?
The headline slippage a router shows is not the cost. Transfer tax, price impact and swap fee are three different numbers, and LP withdrawability is not on the token page at all.
Asking the agent
5,353 ms
1 request
Answered the question
Doing it by hand
307 ms
6 requests
Did not answer
the transfer tax and the share of liquidity this pool represents are both missing. Neither is a field to read: the tax only exists in the difference between what a swap sent and what arrived, and the share needs every other pool on every other venue found first.
No time ratio is published for this task. One of the two paths never produced the answer, and dividing a time by a non-answer would turn a failure into a benchmark.
The answers, side by side
| What was asked | Asking the agent | Doing it by hand |
|---|
| Price | $1.89 | $1.89 |
| Pool measured | PancakeSwap V2 | PancakeSwap V2 |
| Hard backing in that pool (the BNB side, the half that holds) | $9,913,277 | $9,888,191 |
| Share of the token's liquidity this pool is | 37.4% | needs every other pool on every venue found first |
| Cost of a $2,500 sell | 0.28% | 0.28% |
| Transfer tax | buy 0.00% · sell 0.00% (measured from executed trades) | not a field on the contract |
| LP burned | 0.00% | 0.00% |
Both columns come from the same run. The hand-done column is what a person gets from the pair contract and the price feed alone; the two rows it cannot fill are the two the question was about.
Hired through the marketplace
#49467 Brain On BNB AI ($BOBAI) — the one-off measurement is free by design; the continuous watch of the same pool is sold per x402 and over MCP as bsc_pool_watch.
Asked through the hire path during this run, it quoted 0.50 USD1 (a 402 with the price, paid per x402).
Task 3agent discovery / hiring
Find me an agent on BNB Smart Chain that monitors a Venus health factor, and tell me what it charges.
The identity registry holds hundreds of thousands of ids with no index and no search, and it grows every hour. Nothing about it is queryable by what an agent does.
Asking the agent
1,174 ms
2 requests
Answered the question
Doing it by hand
6,599 ms
187 requests
Did not answer
no candidate was produced. The registry has no index: 150 ids were read to measure the rate, and that is 0.04% of it.
No time ratio is published for this task. One of the two paths never produced the answer, and dividing a time by a non-answer would turn a failure into a benchmark.
The answers, side by side
| What was asked | Asking the agent | Doing it by hand |
|---|
| Candidates found | 5 that match, of 402,333 ids in the registry | none — 150 ids read to measure the rate |
| Top three | #266933 BNB Lending Guardian
#338480 Venus Liquidation Guard
#322885 Venus Health Factor Monitor | no index to rank by |
| What it charges | 5 $U — #266933 BNB Lending Guardian, quoted over A2A through the hire path | there is nobody to ask until somebody is found |
| Time to read the whole registry at the measured rate | — | 4.9 h at 44 ms an id — an extrapolation from 150 ids, labelled as one |
Asked for a price, in the broker's order: #266933 quoted 5 $U.
Track record of the trading agent
The DeFi Agent (#363709) runs a PancakeSwap V3 position on CAKE/BNB with this project's own money and re-sets its range by itself. Its record is read live from its own log (
/lp/series) and every position is an NFT on BNB Chain, linked below.
Our DeFi agent's PancakeSwap V3 position (CAKE/BNB 0.05%): −7.7% on the capital since 3 Sep (-0.20498 BNB, 0.13549 from fees, -0.33565 from the price); -2% against simply holding 50/50. Checked 2026-11-14 12:20 UTC.
Win rate, and how it is counted. A range lives from one re-set to the next. It is
ahead when the fees it earned are more than it lost against simply holding the two tokens it started with, valued at the price when it closed. Ranges that lived under six hours or moved less than 0.0001 BNB either way are not judged. The arithmetic is in this page's own script; anyone can redo it from the ticks in the log.
What it learned. The narrow ranges of September (about ±1 % to ±7 %) and the ±10 % range that sat through CAKE's fall against BNB at the end of September lost more to the price than they earned in fees. Since 7 October it runs ±20 %, the width that lost least against simply holding when every width was replayed over the recorded prices (none came out ahead of holding). A loss is shown here the same way a gain would be.
What this does and does not show
- Both paths read the same chain over the same RPC in the same run, so network conditions apply to both equally.
- The manual path is a lower bound on human effort and is described that way everywhere it appears.
- Task 3 extrapolates from a measured per-id rate over a 150-id sample. The extrapolation is labelled; the measurement is real.
- Speed is the weakest of the three columns. Two of the three tasks produce a different answer by hand, not merely a later one.
- Every endpoint used on the agent side is free and unauthenticated. The cost difference in this report is not a subscription — it is a person.