Agents

Why agents use Tollex

A technical summary of what an agent gets from routing purchases through Tollex instead of calling paid resources directly.

Normalised capability discovery

Capabilities arrive from OpenAPI documents, provider manifests, first-party tools, MCP servers, A2A agents and x402 resources. Tollex describes each one with the same model: identity and version, a strict input schema, price and payment scheme, supported networks and assets, receipt and evidence capabilities, side-effect class and observed health. An agent compares candidates field by field instead of parsing four formats.

Policy enforced before signing

The agent’s economic authority is a policy: per-request ceilings, hourly and daily budgets, allowed networks, assets, providers, tools and merchants, the longest signature lifetime and the receipt it requires. The client evaluates the policy before the signer is invoked, and the signer refuses anything the policy did not approve. Budget reservations are atomic, so concurrent calls cannot overspend.

Multi-provider routing

Resolve evaluates every candidate against hard constraints first, then ranks only the eligible ones with a published formula. The plan names the selected capability, the reasons it won and a reason code for every rejected candidate. A model may help order eligible candidates; it can never select a rejected one.

One payment interface

Exact payments through EIP-3009 or Permit2, metered upto payments and batch-settlement channels all go through the same call. Scheme-specific requirements are not hidden: when a route needs a Permit2 allowance or a channel deposit, the plan returns it as a precondition.

Reconciliation instead of guessing

Operations are recorded durably before money moves. A lost response does not cause a second payment: retries carry the same authorization and receive the stored result, and the operation’s settlement is reconciled against the chain. Agents read the state from the operation endpoint.

Receipts

Each paid response carries a signed receipt binding the tool, the quote, the request, the payment terms, the actual charge, the response and the settlement. The client verifies it before handing the result back.