SELAT and Skyfire both help AI agents transact, but they solve different problems. SELAT is a runtime payment layer: an agent discovers a paid API, data source, or skill mid-task, sees the merchant's live quote, and settles it in USDC from one self-custody treasury over x402 or MPP. Skyfire describes itself as "The Agent Trust Stack": verified agent identity plus a commerce wallet, aimed at getting agents through website access, login, and checkout.
Everything below about Skyfire comes from skyfire.xyz as read on August 25, 2026. Where we could not verify a fact, we say so rather than guess.
What does each product actually do?
SELAT pays every paid endpoint your agent's task calls — across x402, MPP, or whatever ships next — from one self-custody USDC treasury, in one execution. Discovery is free and federated: any merchant publishing an endpoint behind an HTTP 402 payment protocol is reachable without a signup. Each call is quoted before spend, checked against your hard caps, and lands in one reconciled ledger.
Skyfire gives agents a verified identity token (they call it KYA — Know Your Agent) intended to unblock website access and logins, and an agentic wallet that completes checkouts. Their site says the wallet supports tokenized card transactions across major card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Discover are named) as well as USDC, plus a "Buy for Me" purchase flow using user mandates. Their listed partners include bot-management and identity vendors such as Akamai, DataDome, f5, HUMAN Security, Okta, and Fastly.
When is Skyfire the better choice?
Be honest about this — for some jobs it clearly is:
- Your agent buys from human storefronts. If the task is checking out on retail websites with an end user's enrolled card, that is Skyfire's product and not SELAT's. SELAT does not do card checkout on websites.
- Your agent is blocked by bot defenses. Skyfire's KYA identity token exists to get verified agents through access controls and logins. SELAT has no identity product; if your blocker is a 403 or a login wall rather than a 402 price, SELAT does not remove it.
- You need card rails. Skyfire names the major card networks as partners. SELAT settles in USDC only.
When is SELAT the better choice?
- Your agent pays machine-native API endpoints per call. Search, scraping, enrichment, media generation, on-chain data — priced per request behind HTTP 402, paid at call time with no account, no API key, and no subscription.
- The capability is discovered at runtime. SELAT's catalog is federated: the agent searches for a capability it didn't know about when you wrote the prompt, inspects the live quote, and pays only after your policy allows it.
- Custody matters to you. Your treasury is a non-custodial MPC agent wallet — Circle Agent Wallet by default. SELAT never holds your keys and never custodies your balance; hard caps are enforced in the settlement path.
- You want one reconciled record. Every settled call, every rail, one ledger — each payment mapped 1:1 to the named merchant it paid.
Can you use both?
They sit at different layers, so nothing about one excludes the other: identity and website checkout on one side, per-call API settlement on the other. There is no integration between the two products today.
How do they differ on custody?
SELAT's treasury is self-custody by construction: the MPC key never exists as a file anywhere, and only your wallet can sign a payment — a skill can ask, it can't sign. Skyfire's wallet enrolls user credit cards and manages stablecoins on the agent's behalf; how custody of those balances works beyond that is not stated on their homepage — {{VERIFY: Skyfire custody model}}.
What does each cost?
SELAT's fee is published: 0% on endpoints from the Circle Agent Marketplace, 5% on endpoints from other registries, included in the quote your agent sees before it pays. The merchant's own per-call price is quoted live — simple calls typically run $0.001–$0.05.
Skyfire does not publish pricing on its homepage — {{VERIFY: Skyfire fees and pricing}}.
Side by side
| SELAT | Skyfire | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Pay per-call API endpoints discovered at runtime | Agent identity, website access, and checkout |
| Rails | x402 and MPP (HTTP 402), USDC | Tokenized card networks and USDC (per skyfire.xyz) |
| Identity product | None | KYA verified-agent token |
| Card checkout on websites | No | Yes — their core use case |
| Catalog | Federated — any 402 merchant reachable, no signup | Partner-integrated coverage; their site claims "more than 60% of the Web" |
| Custody | Self-custody MPC wallet; SELAT never holds keys or funds | Managed agent wallet; custody model {{VERIFY: Skyfire custody model}} |
| Spend controls | Hard caps enforced in the settlement path | User mandates on card transactions (per skyfire.xyz) |
| Published fees | 0% Circle Agent Marketplace / 5% other registries | Not published — {{VERIFY: Skyfire fees and pricing}} |
The short version
If your agent needs to be somebody — a verified identity that gets it through logins and card checkouts on human websites — look at Skyfire. If your agent needs to pay for capabilities — machine-priced API calls it discovers mid-task, settled from a treasury you control — that is what SELAT is for.
Skyfire facts sourced from skyfire.xyz, read August 25, 2026. If anything here is out of date, tell us at hello@selat.ai and we'll correct it.