What Bonded does
Bonded gives every AI agent a vault: a USDC account on Solana whose spending policy the Bonded program enforces on every payment. The agent signs with a session key that can spend only inside that policy. Its operator backs the merchants who bill the agent in arrears with a bond: the operator's own USDC, locked on chain, which pays a merchant's claim if a vault ever comes up short.
An agent pays in one of three lanes:
| Lane | For | How it's bounded | What the merchant relies on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Float | open-web x402 calls | a small USDC allowance the session key spends, refilled at the vault's rate | the allowance itself |
| Tab | metered services billed in arrears | a credit line with a limit, opened by the operator | the operator's bond |
| Escrow | jobs delivered later | a payment bound to the merchant's signed quote | the deadline: no delivery, automatic refund |
Everything here runs against the deployed program and the Bonded API. You act with your own Solana wallet, and every action is a transaction you review and sign in that wallet.
Connect a wallet
Open the app and choose your wallet from the list on the sign-in card. The app lists the Solana browser wallets installed in this browser that support sign-in and transaction signing: Phantom, Solflare, Backpack and other wallets built on the Wallet Standard.
If the list is empty, install one of those wallets, create or import an account, and reload the page.
The wallet you connect is your identity in Bonded:
- As an operator, it's the admin key of your operator account: it creates vaults, posts the bond and opens credit lines.
- As a merchant, it's your merchant identity: operators open credit lines to this address, and settlements pay its USDC account.
- As a co-signer, it approves an operator's large payments under Approvals.
- As a guardian, it can freeze an operator's vaults under Vaults you guard, and nothing else.
- One wallet can hold several of these roles.
Sign in
After you choose a wallet, select Sign in. Your wallet asks you to sign one message. It names this site and carries a one-time challenge from the API. Signing it sends no transaction and costs nothing. It proves you hold the key, and the API answers with a session.
The session is a cookie for this site. It lasts until you select Sign out or it expires; the next visit picks it up again if your wallet still trusts the site.
SOL and USDC
- SOL pays Solana's network fees: 5,000 lamports per signature and a small priority fee, plus rent for the accounts you create (your operator account, each vault, the bond, each line). A few hundredths of a SOL covers an operator's setup.
- USDC is what moves: the vault's balance, the bond, settlements and escrow payments. Bonded uses the network's USDC mint, shown under the service's values.
On devnet, take test SOL from the Solana faucet and test USDC from Circle's faucet (choose Solana Devnet). On mainnet, fund the wallet with SOL and USDC as you would for any Solana app.
How every action works
Each command in the app, such as Create the vault, Post the bond or Open the line, goes through the same four steps:
- Prepare. The API builds the exact transaction for that action and simulates it against the program. If the program would refuse it, the app shows why, and nothing is sent to your wallet.
- Sign. Your wallet opens with the transaction. You review it and approve it. The key never leaves the wallet.
- Submit. The API checks that the signed transaction is the one it prepared, then sends it to the network.
- Confirm. The app waits for the network to confirm it, then refreshes. Every action you send this way is listed under Sent from here, with its signature.
Each prepared transaction already carries a small priority fee, so it lands promptly. Your wallet may add its own safety checks after Bonded's instructions when you sign; Bonded accepts those and refuses any other change to what it prepared.
Pick your role
- Operators run agents: a vault per agent, a bond, credit lines to merchants. Everything an operator does happens in the app.
- Merchants sell metered services or jobs to agents: the merchant middleware meters requests and settles vouchers, and the app shows lines, settlements, claims and escrow jobs.
- Agent developers give an agent its session key and the Bonded SDK or MCP server, so it can pay merchants on a tab, from its float, or in escrow.
- API is the HTTP reference underneath all three.
The litepaper explains the mechanism in a few pages; the whitepaper covers it in full.
The service's values
The SDK, the merchant middleware and the MCP server each pin the program and the network they expect, independently of the API, and refuse to sign anything for another. These are the values this service runs on, read live: