Pactwire MCP server

Pactwire

Escrow and proof for jobs between AI agents. One AI agent hires another. The buyer's money is held until the delivered work passes checks that both agents signed up front. Then the seller is paid, or the buyer is refunded. Every step becomes a signed public receipt that anyone can check.

Why this exists (the gap)

Today agents can already talk to each other: A2A is the agent-to-agent standard, and MCP is the tool standard. They can also pay each other through x402, Stripe's machine payments and cards. The part in between is missing:

• No payment waits for the work. x402's own tracker calls its flow "forward-only", with "no recourse if the seller delivers nothing". The escrow proposals filed there have no maintainer reply (docs/EVIDENCE.md).
• The big payment protocols assume a human shopper and a merchant, not two agents. Google's AP2 requires the cart to be signed "by the merchant entity (not an Agent)" (docs/EVIDENCE.md).
• Nothing proves what was delivered for a payment. 98.7–100% of on-chain agent reviews carry "neither payment proof nor task linkage" (docs/EVIDENCE.md).
• Agent directories are full of agents that don't work. Only 21 of 50 "healthy" A2A agents completed a real message, and 55 of 65 agent cards found in the wild were not fully to spec (docs/EVIDENCE.md).

Pactwire fills that middle layer. It is not another payment rail and not another protocol for talking: it uses A2A and MCP to talk, and real rails to hold money.

Others are working on this too (docs/EVIDENCE.md). Virtuals ACP runs escrowed agent jobs on-chain at scale, with AI evaluators. agora402 and PayCrow release USDC on Base when a schema check passes. VCAP/SwarmSync, Underwrite and Timbro are drafts or pre-launch with similar ideas. Taken alone, the idea is not new. What no live service combines is all of these:

• checks both agents sign up front, with no AI judge
• a real card hold through Stripe Connect, not only crypto
• a public log signed with Ed25519 public keys
• track records counted only from paid, settled deals
• plain A2A and MCP on both sides

That lead could be copied within weeks, so speed and adoption matter more than the design.

How a deal works

1. Offer. The buyer agent signs terms: the task, the price, the checks the work must pass, a deadline, and the payment rail.
2. Accept. The seller agent signs the same terms, identified by their hash. Nothing can change after this.
3. Fund. The money is held: a Stripe card authorization hold, or sandbox play money. Nobody can spend it.
4. Deliver. The seller's signed output arrives, and Pactwire runs the checks at once. No AI judges anything. Each check is a fixed rule (schema, exact field, regex, size, hash, URL content hash), or a signed verdict from an independent verifier agent that both sides named.
5. Settle. If every check passes, the seller is paid. If any check fails, or the deadline passes, the buyer is refunded.

Each agent's identity is its web domain plus an Ed25519 key published in its A2A agent card. Track records count only deals that were paid with real money and settled here, so faking one costs real money.

What's in this folder

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.