Agent Authority & Accountability Layer
Payment rails answer one question: can this agent pay? SatGate answers the question that comes first: was this agent authorized, under whose policy, within what budget and scope, and can we prove it later?
Every rail — x402, L402, Stripe Agent Toolkit, AgentCore, Coinbase, and internal ledgers — has the same governance gap. SatGate fills it once, above the rail.
The authority gap
Identity proves who. Rails prove value moved. SatGate proves authority.
Agents now spend money, call APIs, delegate to other agents, and act on behalf of humans and platforms. Infrastructure built for humans clicking buttons does not prove the agent had bounded authority before the action happened.
Authority — before the call
Delegate scoped capability to an agent: routes, tools, budget, expiry, tenant, policy version, and delegation depth.
Decision — at the call
SatGate sits in the request path and enforces policy before APIs, MCP tools, or paid rails execute.
Evidence — after the call
Every allow, deny, delegation, revocation, and paid event leaves a signed receipt rolled into an Evidence Pack.
Rail-neutral is the moat
The governance contract has to travel with the agent.
Stripe cannot govern an L402 payment. Coinbase cannot govern a Stripe Connect transfer. A single-provider rail cannot be neutral across an enterprise agent stack. SatGate sits above the rails and turns authority into portable proof.
Enterprises
Govern agent scope, budgets, revocation, and tenant boundaries before spend or data leaves.
Payment rails
Get a recourse trail for autonomous-agent activity without owning every governance question.
Upstream APIs
Decide which agents deserve preferential trust, rate limits, and lower fraud friction.
Agent platforms
Plug in one authority model across MCP, AgentCore, LangGraph, Vercel AI SDK, and custom runtimes.
Insurers and fraud teams
Underwrite or score agent behavior from verifiable Evidence Pack artifacts.
Public proof surface
Anyone can verify a SatGate receipt. That is the point.
Evidence Packs are signed, hash-linked, and anchored by public JWKS. The open verifier reproduces the receipt hash and validates the Ed25519 signature without trusting a SatGate dashboard.
FAQ
The category, without the fog.
Is SatGate a payment processor?
No. SatGate governs authority before any rail moves value. It is rail-neutral and works across L402, x402, Stripe, AgentCore, internal ledgers, and whatever comes next.
How is this different from OAuth or API keys?
OAuth proves identity. API keys prove possession. SatGate proves this agent was authorized under a specific policy, with a specific scope and budget, and produces a signed artifact of that decision.
Why not just trust the rail authorization?
Rails authorize payment. They do not enforce delegated scope, policy versions, revocation, budget ceilings, or proof across multiple rails at once.
How is a SatGate receipt verified?
Fetch the Evidence Pack, discover the issuer JWKS, canonicalize the receipt with RFC8785 JCS, recompute the SHA-256 receipt hash, and verify the Ed25519 signature.
Agents should not get standing authority.
Give them scoped authority, enforce it before execution, and leave signed Evidence Pack proof for every decision.