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Quick start

This is the proxy's equivalent of the chat app's Quick start: install the binary, start it, connect a tool, add a little money, and send a request. Plan on a few minutes.

Install​

brew install txnlab/tap/zs-proxy

The macOS build is a code-signed, notarized universal binary.

No Homebrew? The one-line installer works here too:

curl -fsSL https://zerosignal.ai/install.sh | sh

Every channel installs the same prebuilt binaries from the zs-proxy releases page — each release ships archives for every platform, with a checksums.txt to verify a direct download against. Prefer to do it by hand? Grab the archive for your platform, check it against checksums.txt, and put zs-proxy on your PATH.

Start it​

zs-proxy proxy start

start backgrounds itself as a daemon and returns you to the prompt with the proxy listening on :9376. The first time you run it, with no wallet configured yet, it asks (on the terminal) whether to:

  • Sign in with your browser — pulls in the same wallet your passkey controls in the chat app, with nothing to paste;
  • Import a 24-word recovery phrase you already have; or
  • Create a new wallet — a fresh account, separate from any chat-app account.

It boots on mainnet with no config.yaml required — the embedded defaults supply the escrow contract id and an algod endpoint, so there's nothing to configure before your first request. To run it in the foreground, for a supervisor or for debugging: zs-proxy proxy start --foreground.

See Wallet & funding for the wallet options in detail, and Connecting AI tools for everything connect can configure.

Add funds​

zs-proxy fund

This prints a deposit address and QR code — the same kind of deposit flow as the chat app's Funding panel, just from your terminal. Add --wait to block until the funds land and the account opts in to USDC automatically.

A couple of dollars covers a lot of requests — see Pricing.

Connect a tool​

zs-proxy connect

With no argument, connect detects which supported AI tools you have installed and walks you through configuring them — no API key to type (the network admits you by your on-chain wallet, not a key), just confirmation prompts. See Connecting AI tools for the full list of tools and what each flag does.

Send your first request​

Open the tool you just connected and send a message. If you'd rather check the wiring directly, curl works too — the proxy is a drop-in OpenAI endpoint:

curl http://localhost:9376/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model": "qwen3-coder", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Say hi in five words."}]}'

No Authorization header is needed — the proxy discards it either way; what admits the request is your wallet's on-chain seal. See Pricing for what each request costs and Connecting AI tools for how to see the cost of a request from the proxy itself.

What's next​