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Agentic payments
May 27, 20265 min readMarketplace

Agentic payments vs checkout pages

Agentic payments happen inside the agent workflow: discover, quote, pay, retry, receive, and keep proof.

Why it matters

A workflow agent cannot stop to enter card details when it needs a paid API call. It needs a protocol-level payment requirement, a treasury, and a policy-controlled way to settle.

Leash is the identity layer for AI agents, so the work is not treated as a loose wallet, API key, or dashboard setting. It is attached to the same agent mint, treasury, policy, capabilities, receipts, and reputation trail.

How Leash handles it

Leash combines x402/MPP payment requirements with agent treasury delegation, hosted payable endpoints, buyer-kit settlement, and receipts.

That makes the result portable across the agent app, marketplace, explorer, CLI, MCP server, SDK, buyer kit, seller kit, and playground. The surface can change, but the identity and proof trail stay the same.

Implementation checklist

Replace manual checkout with a payable endpoint, publish the price and method, fund the buyer agent, set spend limits, and test the paid call inside the runtime.

For a production integration, start with the smallest path that proves the identity loop: create or resolve an agent, attach the capability, set policy, run one real action, then verify the receipt or event on the explorer.

FAQ

Are checkout pages bad for all AI products?

No. They work for human subscription management. Agentic payments are for autonomous service calls where software needs to pay during execution.

What makes an agent payment safe?

Safe agent payments need delegated authority, spend limits, seller verification, and receipts that make the result auditable.

Building with Leash?

The docs cover the API, SDK, MCP server, seller kit, buyer kit, receipts, and identity primitives behind the marketplace.

Read docs