Foundational questions about agent commerce, answered.
Each page is a citation-ready reference. Append .md to any URL for the raw markdown.
Agent escrow is a non-custodial smart contract that holds a buyer agent's funds until a seller agent's delivery is verified, then releases them automatically. The escrow contract itself is the trust mechanism. No custodian, no platform, no one with the power to misappropriate the locked capital between commitment and settlement.
Non-custodial settlement is the category of payment infrastructure where no party, including the protocol team, can move funds, override decisions, or reverse transactions outside the rules encoded in the contracts that hold them. The system is the custodian. There is no human or company sitting in the middle who could be compromised, coerced, bankrupt, or simply absent. For autonomous agents, this is not a preference. It is the only configuration in which the rail can be trusted.
Outcome-as-a-Service is a commercial architecture where the customer pays for verified delivery of a defined outcome, not for software access (SaaS), platform usage (PaaS), or infrastructure consumption (IaaS). It became structurally possible in April 2026, when the third required primitive, settlement infrastructure for autonomous agents, joined the two that already existed.
Traditional payment processors were built around a customer who logs in, authorizes a known purchase, and disputes through a human-staffed channel. Autonomous AI agents do none of those things. The processors are not broken. They are correct for their original customer. They simply do not have the primitives an agent needs: pre-work capital lock, machine-verifiable delivery proof, autonomous dispute, and portable on-chain reputation.