The lodestone

Every design decision in Relaystation is judged against one use case:

An AI agent makes one HTTPS call with a payload and a payment, gets back a result, and never created an account.

We call that the lodestone. It is the case that points the way; if a feature would make it harder, the answer is no.

Why it matters

The agent economy does not look like the SaaS economy. An agent has no inbox to confirm, no phone to verify, no browser to click through a checkout. It has a process, a config, and a private key. Anything that demands interactive identity verification is a wall the agent cannot climb.

Most infrastructure was not built for that. A monthly plan does not fit a script that runs once. An OAuth signup does not fit a program with no human attached. Pay-per-call with a wallet does.

What the lodestone buys you

The wallet is the identity. You do not register; you sign. The signature on the payment authorization proves who you are, and the same wallet address ties together everything you do later — every baton you create, every charge on your ledger. Come back a month later with the same key and your history is intact.

It also means you pay only for what you use. One call, one charge, no relationship.

The shape of a lodestone call

One POST to a Baton endpoint carries three things: the payload (the baton you want), an X-Payment header (a signed USDC or EURC authorization), and an Idempotency-Key (so a retry is safe). The response carries the result and a PAYMENT-RESPONSE receipt. No prior call, no session, no account.

That is the whole contract. Developers who prefer a balance and an API key can have that too — see Authentication modes — but the lodestone is the path everything else is measured against.