How Beacon works

What is a skill?

A folder of instructions that teaches an AI to do one job properly.

That is the whole idea. Most AI assistants are good at everything and expert at nothing. A skill is somebody's hard-won knowledge of a narrow task — reconciling invoices, reading a Postgres migration for lock risk, turning a meeting transcript into owned actions — written down in a form an AI can follow. You buy it once, drop it into your project, and your assistant is suddenly competent at that specific thing.

Inside the folder is a file called SKILL.md holding the instructions, plus anything else the job needs: reference documents, scripts, examples. When you buy, you download the whole folder.

Buying

You need a wallet on Base with some USDC in it, and a little ETH for the network fee — usually a fraction of a cent. There is no account to make and no password.

If you have never used a wallet

A wallet is an app that holds your money and, after you buy, the skill itself. It is the account — that is why there is nothing to sign up for here. Any of these work, and installing one takes a couple of minutes:

• Base App — made by the team behind Base. Holds dollars and skills in one place.
• Coinbase Wallet — a browser extension and a phone app.
• MetaMask — the most widely used one. Works on Base.

Then put USDC in it, on the Base network. USDC is a dollar, so 5 USDC is five dollars — the price you see is the price you pay. You also need a very small amount of ETH in the same wallet, which is what the network itself charges to record the purchase. On Base that is normally a fraction of a cent, and some wallets cover it for you.

Press buy and confirm in your wallet — twice: once to approve the exact payment amount, once to send it. The payment and your copy happen in the same transaction, so either both go through or neither does. Your money goes to the creator directly. Nothing is held by us at any point.

Then where does it go?

You get a zip. Unzip it and put the folder inside your project at .claude/skills/ — or at ~/.claude/skills/ if you want it available in every project rather than one.

Then restart your assistant. Skills are read when a session starts, so one added to a session already running is invisible until you restart it. That is the single most common reason a skill looks like it did not work, and it is not a problem with the skill or with your purchase.

After that, ask for the job it does — it is picked up by name. The skill page repeats these steps the moment your download lands, so you do not have to come back here.

Why some prices are hidden

Beacon proves every price against Base in your own browser before showing it. If it cannot prove one, it shows no price rather than a number it cannot stand behind.

The usual reason is that somebody listed or re-priced a skill a few minutes ago and the price index has not caught up. It fixes itself, normally within ten minutes, and the page says so in plain words when it happens. Nothing is wrong with your wallet and nothing is wrong with the skill.

How the files actually reach you

When you buy, your browser makes a key and puts the public half inside the payment itself. A program watches Base for sales, checks on the blockchain that you really hold what you bought, and writes one small record — the skill’s key, locked to your key — to permanent storage. Your page finds that record and opens it. Nothing hands you a key over the internet, and nothing has to still be running for a record already written to keep working.

The key lives in the browser you bought in

Not in your wallet, and not with us. It is made on the spot the first time you buy anything and it opens everything you have ever bought, on that browser, for as long as you keep it.

Losing it is not losing what you bought. A new browser, a cleared history, a new laptop — sign with the wallet that holds the licence, present a new key, and you are delivered again. That works because the licence is on Base rather than in a database here, so the thing that proves you own it is the thing you already have. The old records stay where they are and become unreadable by everybody, including us.

What is public

Who can open the skill besides you

The creator, always — it is their work. And, unless they run their own delivery, this marketplace holds a copy of the key too, because something has to lock each skill to each buyer. We say that plainly rather than claiming otherwise: a creator who does not want it that way can run the same delivery program in their own Cloudflare account in about two minutes, from a button in their console, and then we never see it.

What none of that allows: taking a licence away from you, changing what you already downloaded, or stopping a record that has already been written from opening. Once you have been delivered, nobody — not the creator, not us — can undo it.

Is a skill safe to run?

Treat one exactly like a dependency you are about to add to a project, because that is what it is. It is instructions your AI will follow, and your AI may have access to your files or your wallet.

Every listing is scanned for one specific thing: whether it can build blockchain transactions. If it can, the page says touches your wallet and explains what that means, and the creator has to stake money against it behaving as described.

Beacon does not review skills for quality, and says so on every listing rather than implying an endorsement it has not made. "Nobody has reviewed this" is the ordinary state of a new listing, not an accusation.

Updates, and why yours never changes

When a creator improves a skill, the new version is added. It does not replace what you bought.

This is deliberate and it is the main protection you have. The nasty version of a software supply-chain attack is a package that ships clean releases for a year, earns trust, and then goes bad in an update that lands silently in everyone's project. Here that cannot happen: your copy is pinned to the exact bytes you paid for, and a new version is a separate thing you have to go and choose.

Your library shows when a newer version exists, so you can look at it and decide.

Writing SKILL.md

Your folder needs one file called SKILL.md at its top level, starting with a short block that names the skill and says when to use it.

---
name: base-gas-estimator
description: Estimate transaction costs on Base before sending. Use when the user asks what a transaction will cost, wants to compare L2 fees, or is deciding whether to batch operations.
---

# Base Gas Estimator

Estimates the total cost of a transaction on Base, including the
L1 data fee that most estimators forget.

## Instructions

1. Read the current base fee with `eth_gasPrice`.
2. Estimate execution gas with `eth_estimateGas`.
3. Add the L1 data availability fee.
4. Report the total in both ETH and USD.

The two rules that matter

Everything else in the folder ships with it — reference files, scripts, whatever the job needs. Hidden files are skipped, so a stray .DS_Store never becomes part of what your buyers download.

Selling

Drop the folder on the sell page, set a price, and approve a few signatures and four transactions — the page names each one as it comes, so you always know what you are approving. Everything else — the preview buyers read, the encryption — happens in your browser, on your machine. Your files are locked before they leave the tab.

What it costs you

The buyer always pays your list price. Beacon’s share comes out of what reaches you, and the exact split is shown to the buyer too, before they approve anything. The rate is enforced by the contract, so no front end can quietly change it. The publishing fee is read from the contract as well and may be zero on this deployment; the launch page prints the number that will actually be charged.

Two different things you can sell

A copy. The normal case. Someone pays your price and gets the files. You keep the skill and can sell it again to as many people as you like.

The skill itself. You can also sell the whole thing as a business — the price, the buyer list, the right to publish updates, and every future sale. The money and the skill change hands in one transaction, so neither side has to trust the other. It stays yours and keeps earning right up until somebody buys it.

Who holds the key to your skill

Your files are published encrypted, and something has to lock the key to each buyer after they pay. By default that is this marketplace’s delivery program, which means we hold a copy of your key and could open your skill. It is said here rather than buried, because the alternative is a promise instead of a fact.

You can remove us from that in about two minutes. Your console has a button that deploys the same delivery program into your own Cloudflare account — their free plan is enough, there is nothing to install, and no key is typed anywhere: the program makes its own inside your account. After that your key goes straight from your browser to your own machine and never passes through us.

Either way, one thing does not change: your own recovery code opens your own work, with no marketplace, no delivery program and no network. Keep it. It is the only copy that nobody can take away, and it is what you would use to serve your own buyers if everything else here stopped existing.

What nobody can do to you

When something goes wrong