← Pollinate Research

Glossary

Definitions used across MAKO's published specifications. Where a term is defined in the frozen taxonomy or receipt spec, those documents are normative.

x402

An open protocol for paying HTTP services per request. A service answers an unpaid request with HTTP status 402 Payment Required and machine-readable payment requirements; the client pays — typically USDC on an EVM chain such as Base — and retries the request with payment proof attached. No API keys, no accounts, no invoices: the payment is the authorization.

Agentic payments

Payments initiated, authorized, and settled by autonomous software agents, without a human approving each transaction. x402 is a common rail for them: the agent reads the 402 challenge, pays from its own wallet, and consumes the response — which is why machine-verifiable trust signals (reliability scores, signed receipts, failure taxonomies) replace the contracts and support tickets human commerce relies on.

Payment verification

Checking, before or after paying, that a paid endpoint is what it claims to be: that it is callable, that its declared price and network match what is actually charged on-chain, and that settlement occurred as quoted. Preflight verification happens before money moves; post-payment verification compares the quote, the settlement transaction, and the delivered response.

x402 receipt

A signed record binding one paid request to its outcome: the request hash, response hash, quoted and settled amounts, settlement transaction hash, and payer address. A receipt makes a paid call disputable from evidence rather than memory. MAKO GUARD receipts are EIP-712 typed-data signatures verifiable against a published signer registry — the full format is the frozen receipt spec v1.0.0.

Settlement failure

The payment settlement fails after the service has already delivered its response; the buyer is not charged. In the MAKO claims taxonomy this is SETTLEMENT_FAILURE: recorded as a failure event — the service did the work unpaid — but never claimable, because no money moved from the buyer.