# Frequently Asked Questions

https://selat.ai/faq

> Cost, custody, caps, and the treasury model behind runtime agent payments — without a dashboard or account layer.

## What does SELAT actually do?

SELAT pays every paid endpoint your agent's skill calls — across x402, MPP, or whatever ships next — from one self-custody treasury, in one execution. Every call is mapped 1:1 to the named merchant it paid, visible in your history — nothing pooled, nothing redistributed.

## What does it cost?

Your agent pays each merchant's live quote per call — the merchant prices the request the moment your agent probes the endpoint, and you see the quote before the agent pays. Simple calls — search, scraping, enrichment — run $0.001–$0.05; heavier endpoints like media generation or deep research run tens of cents to a few dollars.

SELAT's fee: 0% on endpoints from the Circle Agent Marketplace (agents.circle.com), 5% on endpoints from other registries (pay.sh, MPP services, Apify) — included in the quote you see.

## How is this different from an API key?

An API key is something you sign up for, store, and can leak. A settled call is a payment your agent makes at the moment it's needed — mapped to the merchant it paid, no stored secrets.

## Is this crypto? Do I need to buy tokens?

Your agent's treasury holds USDC — that's it. No native ETH, no gas to hold, no exchange account. Fund once via Circle Gateway and every paid call draws from that balance.

## Who holds my funds?

You do. You hold the treasury through a non-custodial agent wallet — Circle Agent Wallet by default today. It's MPC: the private key never exists as a file anywhere, on your machine or ours. SELAT never holds your keys and never custodies your balance — your USDC stays yours until your wallet signs a per-call payment. Skills are declarative: a skill can ask for a payment, but only your wallet can sign one, and your caps are checked before it does. A skill can ask; it can't sign.

## What stops a bad skill from draining my treasury?

Hard caps — per-transaction, per-session, daily, weekly, monthly limits you set, enforced in the settlement path, not in the skill's prose. A compromised skill can request settlement, but can't exceed your caps or reach your keys.

## How do I see what my agent spent?

One ledger. Every settled call — every skill, every rail — lands in a single reconciled view: selat history.

## Do I need a wallet for every chain or every rail?

No — one balance, one deposit. Deposit USDC into Circle Gateway from any one of the 7 EVM chains SELAT supports — Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Ethereum, Avalanche, or Unichain — and SELAT settles every merchant from that one balance, whatever chain or rail they're on. A chain is where your treasury lives; a rail is how a merchant gets paid (x402 or MPP).

## Which agent harnesses does this work with?

Any harness that reads install.md — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes, and more.

## Do I need to store API keys to compose a skill?

No — none in the source, and none demanded at runtime. Payment is the auth: each endpoint is paid at the moment it's called — no signups, no secrets to provision, nothing redistributed. Some merchants issue a prepaid access token at runtime; that's a receipt, not a key — proof of a payment already made, bounded by its remaining balance, governed by your caps.

## Does this replace OAuth integrations like Gmail or Slack?

No. SELAT's catalog covers commercial paid endpoints — it doesn't replace OAuth access to your own SaaS accounts.

## How is this different from an API aggregator or proxy?

Aggregators and proxies remove key sprawl by pooling accounts for you — and they gatekeep the catalog: your agent reaches only the merchants they've chosen to integrate. SELAT removes accounts entirely and federates the catalog: any merchant that publishes an endpoint behind an HTTP 402 payment protocol is already reachable. Payment is the access. Protocol is the integration.