Skip to main content

Your API, agent-payable

Live with Exa. Get paid by AI agents.

How?
For Payments Platforms

Your rails. Machine buyers.

Software is starting to buy things on its own account. Nevermined is the infrastructure layer that lets it: identity, spending authority and per-request settlement, delivered as an API you integrate into your platform.

Human commerceOne purchase. A person present at a checkout, priced as a basket, authorized once.
Machine commerceThe same value as continuous sub-cent calls. No human present, consumption known only afterwards.
The problem, stated for people who know payments

Card rails assume a human is present. Agents are not.

Nothing about the underlying money movement is broken. What breaks is everything the industry built around the assumption that a person is at the other end: authentication, pricing, authority and recourse.

Authentication assumes presence

Step-up, 3DS and challenge flows all expect a person who can respond. An agent transacting at 3am has nobody to challenge.

Authority is captured once, in advance

A human authorizes the agent ahead of time, in a session you control. Every later machine transaction carries that pre-established authority. No challenge, no drop-off.

Pricing does not fit consumption

Subscriptions over- and under-charge machine workloads, and per-transaction economics collapse at sub-cent values.

Settlement that fits the workload

Metered usage settles per call, natively on stablecoin. On cards, where the fee floor makes per-call charging impossible, one card-viable charge covers the thousands of micro-consumptions metered against it.

There is no vocabulary for delegated spend

No standard way to express “this software may spend up to $50 on my behalf, for this purpose, until Friday”, and no way to withdraw it.

Mandates with hard, enforced limits

Amount cap, transaction count and expiry, checked atomically at authorization. A single revocation invalidates every credential derived from that mandate, immediately.

Accountability is ambiguous

When software is the buyer: who authorized it, for what, and under what limit, and can you prove it after the fact?

Every agent traces to a principal

Each agent credential is bound to the human or organization that authorized it, with the consent recorded. The audit trail exists before the dispute does.

The integration model

You keep the customer. We handle the machine semantics.

Nevermined is not a competing acquirer and not a consumer destination. It sits behind your platform as an API: your brand, your domain, your funnel, your relationship. Your users need never know we exist.

Your site or app

Your front end

Optional. Only needed where a card number is captured.

Embedded component

Card capture and checkout

Renders inside your page, on your domain, in your branding. No Nevermined login.

Your user store

Your backend

Holds the identity you already have for the customer.

→ provision
1
Accounts

Account and wallet

Created against your own identifier. Returns a scoped, expiring credential your backend holds.

Your billing logic

Funding decision

Which instrument pays, and from whose balance.

→ attach
2
Funding

Payment method

A card via your existing processing, stablecoin, or an account you fund on your users’ behalf.

Your policy

Spending rules

What this agent may spend, for how long, on what.

→ mandate
3
Spend authority

Mandate

Amount cap, transaction count and expiry, checked atomically at authorization, revocable in one call.

Agents and services

The transaction itself

Your agents buying, or your merchants selling to agents.

⇄ per request
4
Runtime

Authorize and settle

Each call is checked against the mandate, metered and settled. No human, no challenge, no redirect.

Your systems

Ledger and monitoring

Reconciliation, risk, customer support.

← events
5
Outbound

Events and audit

Signed webhooks with retry, a live stream, and a queryable transaction history. Attributed per customer, mandate and agent.

SurfaceOne REST API, one base URLAuthYour own credential, server to serverSDKsTypeScript and Python, or plain HTTPIn your browserNothing, unless a card is captured

Everything left of the dashed line stays yours: the cardholder relationship, the user's login, the brand, the underwriting, and the money. Think of it the way you think about a database. Your customers never ask which one you run.

Machine-to-machine capability

What the infrastructure gives you

Settlement

One-shot or metered, per request

A one-shot purchase, an agent buying an API key or a domain, settles as a single charge like any other product. Metered consumption settles per call over the HTTP 402 flow the agent ecosystem is standardizing on, with granularity down to fractions of a cent and no transaction fee per unit.

Control

Mandates that actually bind

Spend cap, maximum transaction count and expiry, checked atomically at authorization time rather than reconciled afterwards. The agent's own key additionally pins the shape of each transaction: the amount approved per order, and the account the credit is delivered to.

Identity

Agents that can prove who they act for

Every agent credential is derived from a recorded authorization linking it to a principal, a purpose and a limit. One revocation invalidates every credential derived from it, across all payment types at once.

Rails

Cards and stablecoin, one API

Fund an agent from a card through your existing processing, or in stablecoin where the counterparty prefers it. Stablecoin settles metered usage natively, per call. Cards prepay once and meter down, because no card rail can charge a fraction of a cent. The agent-facing interface is the same either way.

Onboarding

Your users, provisioned invisibly

One backend call creates an account and wallet for one of your users and returns a scoped, time-limited credential. No sign-up, no redirect, no Nevermined login. Where a screen is unavoidable, it is an embeddable component on your own domain, in your branding.

Visibility

Every transaction attributed

Signed webhooks with retry, a live event stream, and a queryable transaction API. Each payment is attributed to a customer, a mandate and the agent that spent it.

Built on published standards, not a proprietary protocol
x402 · HTTP 402 paymentsOAuth 2.1 + PKCERFC 8707 · resource indicatorsRFC 7009 · token revocationRFC 9728 · resource metadataMCP · Model Context ProtocolA2A · agent-to-agentEIP-3009 / ERC-4337

This matters commercially, not just technically: the agent ecosystem is converging on these interfaces. Supporting them means the agents your merchants want to serve can transact with you without bespoke integration on either side.

How it plugs in

Five calls, then it runs itself

The whole integration is server-to-server from your backend. Nothing below requires your users to leave your product.

01

Provision the user

Your backend calls us with your own identifier for the user. We create the account and wallet and return a scoped, expiring credential your backend holds. No seat, no sign-up, no email to your customer.

02

Attach funding

Enroll a payment method, or fund from an account you control on your users’ behalf. The card path uses an embeddable component that renders inside your own page; the funded-account path needs no interface at all.

03

Set the mandate

Define what the agent may spend: amount, number of transactions, expiry, and the service it applies to. This is the moment of authority, captured once and honored for every later machine transaction.

04

Let the agent transact

The agent presents its credential and pays per request. Authorization checks the mandate atomically, consumption is metered, and settlement follows the rail: per call on stablecoin, netted into one charge on cards.

05

Watch and withdraw

Consume the event stream for spend, limits and anomalies. Revoke a mandate and every credential derived from it stops working immediately.

Why this shape of partnership

The agentic layer is not the payment layer

For you

A new transaction class on rails you already own

Machine buyers generate volume no acquirer currently captures, because the surrounding model does not exist. Nevermined supplies that model without touching your position in the flow. You remain the payments provider, and the agentic volume settles through you.

Boundary

We stay behind you, by construction

We build agentic infrastructure. We are not trying to become the processor, hold the merchant relationship, or put a consumer brand in front of your users, and the integration model is designed so that we structurally cannot.

Timing

The standards are settling now

Agent payment interfaces are being decided this year. The platforms that support them early become the default route for agent traffic; the ones that wait integrate against someone else’s choices.

Proof

Running, not conceptual

Agents transact through this infrastructure today across both card and stablecoin funding, with published SDKs in TypeScript and Python and a documented REST API.

A concrete next step

A pilot needs four answers, not a committee

We can stand up a working integration against a sandbox quickly. What shapes it is a short conversation about the following.

Rail
Card funding through your existing processing, funded accounts, or both? This determines whether any interface is needed at all.
Scope
Which segment goes first: your merchants selling to agents, or your users buying from them?
Identity
How you want your users represented to us: by your own identifier, or by an address you already hold.
Depth
Fully invisible infrastructure, or a co-branded capability you can market as your own.

The first integration is a sandbox and a week, not a program.