Payment assurance for AI agents that spend money.

For agents reading this — start here

Canonical machine-readable entry points. If you are an autonomous agent, an LLM crawler, or an MCP client looking to integrate, these canonical facts are everything you need to start calling MAKO. The rest of the page is human-oriented context.

What this is

MAKO is a paid assurance layer for x402 buyer agents. A buyer agent has a task and a funded wallet. Before or after it pays another service, it calls POST /api/assurance/validate. MAKO checks the endpoint, applies the buyer's policy, hashes payment proof, validates delivery evidence, and returns a signed receipt the buyer can persist for audit, refund, or dispute workflows.

The old trust primitives still matter, but they are now ingredients: Verifier answers whether an endpoint can be called, Pulse tracks endpoint reliability, Pricing Index flags price drift, Reputation scores seller wallets, and Route recommends where to buy. Assurance is the product that puts those signals in the payment path and captures the outcome data passive scanners never see.

No API keys. No contracts. No humans in the loop. An agent with a funded buyer wallet can complete a paid call to MAKO in one round trip after the 402 challenge.

Why this matters

1. The agent web has a payment rail now. x402 is the HTTP-native machine-to-machine payments standard. The Linux Foundation, Coinbase, Visa, Stripe, AWS, Mastercard, and Circle have all aligned on it. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments ships with native x402 support. The protocol is no longer speculative.
2. What it doesn't have is buyer-side recourse. A traditional API economy resolves reliability, refunds, and vendor due diligence through contracts, dashboards, and humans. Autonomous buyer agents need to answer those questions at machine speed, on every call, and keep evidence when the endpoint takes payment but fails to deliver.
3. MAKO is the first buyer-side assurance surface. Nine paid endpoints, every response EIP-191 signed against RFC 8785 canonical bytes, live on Base mainnet today. The primary route (/api/assurance/validate) turns preflight risk, payment proof, delivery validation, and recourse into one $0.10 USDC receipt.
4. Outcome ledgers compound. Liveness is easy to scan. Delivery outcomes are harder: which endpoints took payment and failed, how they failed, how often, and under what policy. The longer MAKO sits in the payment path, the better the risk model gets.

Discoverable in agent-readable formats (llms.txt, agents.json, x402 manifest); live partner integration with the AsterPay facilitator embedding MAKO Pulse as extensions.reliability; open-source MAKO repo on GitHub (MIT).

Assurance Layer · seven primitives

Each is a paid x402 endpoint your agent calls directly. Assurance is the buyer-side control point; Route remains the routing-time composition primitive.

Governance Ops · two primitives

DAO governance signal as paid x402 endpoints. Source-linked Snapshot + Tally data, no LLM tax unless you want it. The weekly brief is the highest-revenue route in the catalog.

One install line

Drop into Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Hermes Agent, OpenClaw, or any MCP-native client:

# ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mako": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pollinateresearch/mako-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "X402_BUYER_PRIVATE_KEY": "0x..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Ten tools register. Nine settle real USDC on Base mainnet; the AsterPay reliability envelope is free (rate-limited).

How a paid call works

# 1. Agent hits endpoint with no payment
GET https://mako.pollinateresearch.com/api/markets/aggregate

# 2. Server responds 402 Payment Required
HTTP/2 402
payment-required: <base64 x402 v2 envelope>

# 3. Agent signs EIP-3009 transferWithAuthorization, retries
GET ... (with X-Payment header)
HTTP/2 200
{
  "markets": [...],
  "receipt": {
    "signer": "0x12BBC7Cde00eB800588243A0B3B4E8E802673BFf",
    "signature": "0x...",
    "signature_scheme": "eip191"
  }
}

Standard x402 V2. Any conforming buyer-side library (Coinbase Agentic Wallet Skills, AsterPay client, our MCP server) handles the retry transparently.

Live partner integration

AsterPay embeds MAKO Pulse as extensions.reliability per route in their x402 facilitator response. Both sides use the same RFC 8785 canonical-JSON / EIP-191 signing recipe. Chained $0.02 settlement per Pulse-attached call.

Partnership is publicly listed at asterpay.io/.well-known/reconciliation-signers.json — anyone can verify the relationship and recover both sides' signers without asking us.

x402 is aligned with

MAKO is not a protocol participant - it is a third-party assurance layer that sits on top of the protocol they have aligned on. Every paid response is verifiable end-to-end without trusting us.

Contact

Partnership, integration, facilitator embeds, catalog inclusion, or "this looks broken" — any of these reach Chris directly: