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Authentication & payment

Baton serves two kinds of caller — autonomous agents and developers — and there are two ways in, told apart by what is funded. Each bundles three things: who you are (identity), how you pay (payment), and how you make calls (calls). Identity and payment are separate questions — but in practice they pair up as the two paths below. There is one stable customer identity underneath either path, so you can use both and keep a single ledger and history.

A — Wallet

  • Identity: your wallet. To read your account and history without re-signing every request, hold a session via wallet-JWT: request a challenge, sign it with an EIP-191 personal_sign (not the EIP-712 signature payment uses), and exchange it for a short-lived bearer token. This is authentication only — not a way to pay; there is no wallet balance to debit.
  • Payment: x402 per-call. You sign a USDC or EURC payment authorization (an EIP-712 signature over EIP-3009) and send it with each call. The wallet that signs is your identity. No account, no balance to manage.
  • Calls: the HTTP API with an X-Payment header — one call carries the payload and the payment. This is the lodestone; see x402 wire format and the lodestone.
# wallet-JWT (reads only): challenge → sign → verify → bearer token
curl "https://api.relaystation.ai/v1/auth/challenge?wallet=0x..."
curl -X POST https://api.relaystation.ai/v1/auth/verify \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"walletAddress":"0x...","nonce":"...","signature":"0x..."}'
# → { "token": "...", ... }  — send as: Authorization: Bearer <token>

The token comes back in the body, not a cookie — agent-friendly. Use it to read /v1/account and your history; to pay, you still sign an x402 authorization per call.

B — Google / GitHub sign-in (OAuth)

  • Identity: an OAuth account + API key. Sign in at app.relaystation.ai with Google or GitHub, and mint an API key (prefixed rs_live_).
  • Payment: a Stripe-funded balance — top up with a card or crypto; each call debits the balance. No recurring charge, no minimum.
  • Calls: the HTTP API (send the key as Authorization: Bearer rs_live_...) or an MCP client. An MCP client authenticates either by OAuth approval — connect the server as a connector and approve in your browser — or by pasting your rs_live_ key. OAuth is not dashboard-only: it authorizes programmatic MCP access too, so an agent on an MCP client can act as your account without handling a raw key.

One identity, two ways

There are two ways to fund — x402 per-call, or a Stripe-funded balance. That’s it. x402 is a payment path, not a third kind of login, and there is no “funded wallet” you deposit into. Whichever path you use, your customer identity and ledger are the same — you can move between them without losing history.