Agentic Index
Blaxel vs boxd (2026)
Both vendors last verified
Both keep an agent's machine ready between bursts of work, and they are owned and packaged differently. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Blaxel, acquired by Baseten in September 2026 and still sold under its own name, runs sandboxes as microVMs that suspend after about five seconds idle and resume in about 25ms with memory and processes intact, beside hosted agents and MCP servers, batch jobs, a shared Agent Drive, a model gateway across eight providers and an egress proxy that injects secrets. boxd sells persistent KVM machines that fork with memory in under 200ms and hibernate after four idle hours, with Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode preinstalled, 128 integrations whose credentials stay outside the machine and a live desktop where an agent drives a browser. Blaxel holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 and offers HIPAA BAAs, while boxd's certifications for both are still in progress and self hosts free up to 16 vCPUs. Choose Blaxel when you want sandboxes, MCP hosting and model routing from one vendor with compliance in place, and boxd when agents need integrations and a browser on a machine you can also run yourself.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Blaxel and boxd are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 1,165 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose Blaxel if
- Sandboxes should stop compute charges seconds after going idle and resume in about 25ms.
- Agents, MCP servers and batch jobs should be hosted on the same platform as the sandboxes.
- Model calls should route through one gateway to OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and five more providers.
- Several agents should share one filesystem through Agent Drive.
- Your security review needs SOC 2 and ISO 27001 today, with SAML, SCIM and a HIPAA BAA available.
Choose boxd if
- Agents should act in GitHub, Linear, Slack or Salesforce through 128 integrations without holding the credentials.
- An agent should drive a browser on a live desktop while a person can take over the keyboard.
- Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode should come preinstalled, with a CLI to fork machines from inside.
- You want to self host the same release free up to 16 vCPUs, including air gapped installs.
- TypeScript automations should run on the machine on schedules and on integration events.
| Feature | B Blaxel |
b boxd |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
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Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
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BlaxelIntegrations & Tool Calling Agents reach outside systems through hosted MCP servers. The MCP Hub offers prebuilt servers such as Gmail and Google Maps, customers deploy their own MCP servers as autoscaling endpoints on the same private network as their agents, an OAuth flow lets end users authorize integration connections, and code mode turns any OpenAPI specification into an MCP server whose tools the agent calls by running TypeScript in a sandbox. Outbound calls from a sandbox can also carry secrets injected by the managed egress proxy, so the agent's code never holds the credential. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/functions/overviewread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdIntegrations & Tool Calling Agents on a machine act in outside systems through 128 integrations, including GitHub, Linear, Slack, Notion, Jira, Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe and Zendesk, each with typed tools such as creating an issue or sending a message. A person connects an account once through the provider's consent screen, personally or as a shared connection for the whole organization, and the platform then makes each call on the machine's behalf, so the credential never enters the machine. The in machine run CLI and the @boxd/run SDK call these tools, and scripts reach any other API, database or cloud account with ordinary libraries. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/integrations/connectionsread 2026-11-05 |
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Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
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BlaxelWorkflow Orchestration Batch jobs fan work out across many isolated sandboxes, running tasks in parallel with configurable concurrency, timeouts and retries, and executions can be started, monitored, retried and cancelled from the SDKs. Agents built with LangChain, CrewAI or other frameworks deploy as hosted endpoints, and n8n can orchestrate them. How an agent's own steps are sequenced and handed off stays in the customer's framework, and Blaxel's own session runtime for long running agents is announced but not yet available. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/jobs/overviewread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdWorkflow Orchestration Background jobs give automations a managed lifecycle. A script that registers a schedule or trigger runs as a job that survives reboots, waits for a missing connection instead of failing, and restarts with exponential backoff for up to five attempts before it is marked failed. boxd's fan out pattern has a coordinator create one machine per worker, run a coding agent headless in each and let a lead agent merge the reports, and a fork brings a machine's jobs along paused so nothing runs twice. The sequencing, branching and hand offs in that pattern are code the customer writes against the SDK, and boxd has no workflow graph, step model or multi agent runtime of its own. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/automations/jobsread 2026-11-05 |
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Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
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BlaxelTriggers & Channel Coverage Work starts on schedules, API calls and inbound requests. Sandbox schedules run a command on a cron expression, at a future datetime or after a delay, with an execution history for each run, and batch jobs run on cron schedules or on demand. Hosted agents and MCP servers answer at global endpoints, and a sandbox on standby resumes in about 25ms when a connection arrives. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/sandboxes/schedulesread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdTriggers & Channel Coverage Work reaches a machine on schedules, events and inbound requests. An automation registers durations or cron expressions with every() and subscribes to integration events with .on(), such as a new Linear issue or a pull request through the boxd GitHub App, and 36 integrations emit triggers. The platform holds the next due time and wakes a hibernated machine shortly before it, holds events that arrive while a machine wakes for up to 15 minutes, and fires a missed cron slot once on wake. A hibernated machine also wakes on the next HTTPS request, so an agent served from it answers webhooks at its own address. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/automations/scriptsread 2026-11-05 |
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| Knowledge & context | ||
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Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
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BlaxelKnowledge Grounding & RAG No retrieval index or knowledge base over the customer's content comes with the platform. Agent Drive, volumes and the sandbox filesystem hold files an agent's code reads, and retrieval built with LlamaIndex or another framework runs as the customer's own hosted agent. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/agent-drive/overviewread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdKnowledge Grounding & RAG No retrieval index, vector store or knowledge base over the customer's content comes with the platform. Files on a machine's disk, standalone disks that outlive a machine and data sets saved into a snapshot are storage the agent's code reads, not an index a query returns. Tools such as Notion, Confluence or Google Drive are searched through their own integrations, and any grounding layer is something the customer installs on the machine. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/llms.txtread 2026-11-05 |
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Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
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BlaxelMemory & State Persistence A sandbox on standby keeps its memory and running processes and resumes in about 25ms, even months later, and snapshots, forks and archives copy or preserve that state. Volumes keep data for years, and Agent Drive, free while in beta, gives several agents one shared filesystem for files and session context. This is machine and file state the developer manages, not a memory layer with a stated scope and lifetime that a buyer can review or delete as memory. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/sandboxes/forkread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdMemory & State Persistence Machines keep their working state between sessions. A machine on standby resumes in under a millisecond and a hibernated one wakes with its memory and processes intact, and coding agent sessions live on the persistent disk, so a job delegated in the morning can be resumed interactively later. Forks, checkpoints and snapshots copy or rewind that state. Automations also get object(name), a named JSON store written on every assignment and restored on the next run, meant for cursors, dedup sets and counters. All of it is machine and script state the developer manages, with no memory layer of stated scope and lifetime that a buyer can review, edit or delete as memory. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/automations/scriptsread 2026-11-05 |
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| Control & trust | ||
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Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
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BlaxelHuman Oversight & Guardrails There is no approval step or escalation to a person for an agent's actions. Domain, method and path filters on the egress proxy limit what code can reach, and guardrails come from a partner integration with Rippletide, but nothing pauses an action until someone reviews it. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/sandboxes/proxy-domainsread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdHuman Oversight & Guardrails A person can step into an agent's work while it runs. Every machine has a live desktop in the browser where its owner watches the agent's browser, takes over the keyboard to enter a password, solve a captcha or fix a form, and hands control back without stopping the agent. The preinstalled coding agents are told to share that desktop link whenever they need someone, so a login or approval happens in the browser the agent already opened. There is no approval gate, pause primitive or policy that holds an agent's action until a person reviews it. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/desktopread 2026-11-05 |
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Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
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BlaxelSecurity, Identity & Governance Blaxel holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001, with reports in its compliance portal, and signs HIPAA Business Associate Agreements as a monthly add on. Workspace admins create policies, invite and remove users, change permissions and manage integrations, while members work with agents, MCP servers, model APIs, jobs and sandboxes and can only read policies. SAML single sign on and SCIM directory sync are configured at the account level, service accounts give machines their own credentials, and domain capture controls how a company's users sign in. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/security/workspace-access-controlread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdSecurity, Identity & Governance Organizations have three roles. Members use shared machines and create org billed ones, admins also invite and remove members, change roles, set defaults, create teams and revoke org API keys, and the single owner can demote admins. Admin invites need an interactive login, so an API key or a token minted inside a machine cannot send one. People sign in with GitHub or Google, with SAML single sign on offered to enterprise customers on request. A DPA is available, and SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 are both in progress, not held. Each machine is a KVM microVM with its own kernel, and egress allowlists and host bound secrets are enforced on the host, outside the machine. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/organizationsread 2026-11-05 |
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Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
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BlaxelObservability & Auditability Agents hosted on Blaxel are traced with no setup. Each trace breaks a request into spans for LLM calls, tool calls and agent steps with their inputs and outputs, a sampled 10% of executions are kept and any run can be forced to keep its trace, and custom spans add detail. Logs cover request status, builds and custom output, metrics show request rates, latency percentiles and token use, and the managed egress proxy audits every request an agent sends out. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/observability/overviewread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdObservability & Auditability Automations are visible and the agent's own steps are not. The console's Automations page lists every background job with its triggers in plain English, the integrations it uses, its state, last run and last error, plus a generated write up and flow diagram for each script, and run logs prints or follows a job's log from inside the machine. Regional uptime and incidents appear on a public status page. A coding agent's prompts, tool calls and outputs are not traced by the platform, and no audit trail of member actions is offered. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/automations/jobsread 2026-11-05 |
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Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
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BlaxelDeployment & Data Residency Sandboxes run in one chosen region (Oregon, North Virginia, London or Frankfurt), while agents, MCP servers and jobs spread across the regions a policy allows, and location policies stop any resource from running in a prohibited region. Private networking connects the customer's VPC through private endpoints, and a bring your own metal option runs the sandbox runtime on servers in the customer's own VPC, connected to Blaxel's control plane. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/infrastructure/regionsread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdDeployment & Data Residency Each machine runs in Frankfurt or New York, picked per machine from the CLI, console or SDK or set as an organization default, and its disk, memory, snapshots, checkpoints and backups stay in that region on Latitude.sh bare metal. Scale customers can have boxd operate the cluster inside their own cloud account, and the same release self hosts on AWS, Google Cloud or any KVM host, free up to 16 worker vCPUs and licensed above that, with air gapped installs supported. boxd gives conflicting accounts of its US region, with New York live in some places and coming soon with a waitlist in others. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/regionsread 2026-11-05 |
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| Solution readiness | ||
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Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
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BlaxelPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Starting points come as hubs and templates. The MCP Hub offers prebuilt MCP servers, the Sandbox Hub ready development environments, and deployment templates and full repository examples start new agents and servers, with tutorials for Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw and a dozen frameworks. These are tools and building blocks a developer assembles, not finished agents a business adopts. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/examples/overviewread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Machines arrive with Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode installed and configured through an instructions file that teaches each agent the platform, plus three preinstalled skills covering the in machine CLI, automations and the desktop, and a CLI skill for the laptop. Guides walk through development workspaces, preview environments, CI runners, personal assistants, sandboxes, agentic SaaS, RL environments and agent swarms, and connectors exist for open source tools such as TanStack AI, Pydantic AI, Harbor and Scale AI AgentEnv. These are configured third party agents and recipes a developer builds from, not prebuilt agents of boxd's own. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/use-cases/coding-agentsread 2026-11-05 |
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| Platform extensibility | ||
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Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
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BlaxelModel Flexibility & Routing The customer chooses the models its agents call. The model gateway puts OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Cohere, xAI, DeepSeek, Azure AI Foundry and Hugging Face models behind one endpoint with central credentials, policies can cap tokens, and any agent or coding tool running in a sandbox can use whichever model it is configured for. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/models/overviewread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdModel Flexibility & Routing The customer decides which agents and models run. Claude Code and Codex use the customer's own subscription, signed in once and served to every private machine in the organization, or an API key stored as a secret, OpenCode signs in on each machine, and any other agent or model that runs on Linux can be installed. boxd adds no model of its own and does not route between providers, and it does not use customer data to train or improve any model. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/use-cases/coding-agentsread 2026-11-05 |
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APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
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BlaxelAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Every resource is managed through a REST API with public OpenAPI specifications, TypeScript, Python and Go SDKs and the bl CLI, covering sandboxes, snapshots, schedules, previews, agents, MCP servers, jobs, drives, volumes, policies, secrets and workspaces. An MCP server lets assistants such as Claude, Codex or Cursor manage Blaxel resources, and each sandbox exposes its own API and MCP server for files and processes. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/api-reference/introductionread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Outside code drives the platform through TypeScript and Python SDKs, a gRPC API whose full api.proto service definition is public for generating stubs in any language, and a CLI that returns JSON from its commands. Each region has its own API endpoint, and organization API keys keep working after the person who created them leaves. The SDKs cover machines, forks, snapshots, checkpoints, disks, egress, secrets, domains, organizations and teams, and a filesystem API reads and writes files inside a machine from code. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/reference/grpc-apiread 2026-11-05 |
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Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
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BlaxelTesting, Debugging & Optimization There are no test cases, scoring or quality gates for an agent's behavior. Traces and logs show what a run did after the fact, and reinforcement learning or benchmark runs that use the sandboxes score themselves in the customer's own code. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/llms.txtread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdTesting, Debugging & Optimization There are no test cases, scoring or quality gates for an agent's behavior. The platform is where evaluations run, not how they are scored. Forks give every reinforcement learning rollout or benchmark trial a byte identical starting state, Moyai ran 279,577 Harbor benchmark machines on it, and a reproducibility check compares two forks run with the same seed, but rewards, datasets and scoring belong to the customer's own framework. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/use-cases/reproducible-rl-environmentsread 2026-11-05 |
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| Specialist automation | ||
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Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
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BlaxelBrowser & Computer Use No browser or desktop for an agent to drive comes with the platform. Sandboxes run web apps behind preview URLs for people to view, and an agent that needs to browse installs and drives a browser itself inside the microVM. Sourcedocs.blaxel.ai/llms.txtread 2026-11-05 |
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boxdBrowser & Computer Use Agents drive a real browser on the machine's own desktop. Every machine ships a browser automation CLI built for agents, backed by Chromium with anti bot fingerprinting and a persistent profile so logins stick, and scripts get the same browser through Playwright. A machine can also drive a Chrome window on the user's laptop over the DevTools protocol, for sites that only accept the user's own network, and the preinstalled agents get a browser tool for it automatically. Any GUI app installed on the machine opens on the same desktop. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/launch-a-browserread 2026-11-05 |
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Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | B Blaxel |
b boxd |
|---|---|---|
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Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Pay as you go with up to $200 in free credits, at $0.0000115 per GB of RAM per second of active sandbox compute. | Pay as you go with €30 of free credit, at €0.039 per active vCPU hour and €0.012 per GiB hour of memory in use. |
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Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, exact | Public, exact |
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Billing Primary billing axis |
Active compute per GB of RAM per second, plus snapshot, image and volume storage | Per second active vCPU, memory in use and disk written |
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Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
High variable cost | High variable cost |
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Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tier
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Free tier
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Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Mixed |
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Pricing verified When this pricing was last checked |
Blaxel has been owned by Baseten since September 2026. Blaxel keeps running under its own name, existing API keys and credits remain valid, and Baseten plans to build new products on Blaxel's primitives, starting with sandboxes. boxd's SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications are still in progress, and boxd gives conflicting accounts of its US region.
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