Settlement & Machine Commerce

A useful service should be buyable by a person with a card and by a software agent with a wallet, at a price fixed in advance. Most of the market offers one or the other, and the agent path usually ends in an API key negotiated by email.

UnyKorn's rule is older than the rail: flat fees and subscriptions, never a share of a client's recovery, trade or income, never a commission. The machine rail exists so that the same rule holds for buyers who cannot sign anything.

Two rails, one rule: the price is known before the work, and nobody at UnyKorn is paid a percentage of anything.

The BIS sets three tests for money and finds stablecoins short on all three; Project Agorá is testing tokenised deposits and reserves with eight central banks; the IMF's first policy element withholds legal-tender status from crypto assets; the WEF's tokenization report ties market access to trusted infrastructure. UnyKorn's rails are designed to sit inside those conclusions: dollars as the unit of account, a stablecoin accepted only as payment for a finished call, no balances held, issuance research kept in test.

People pay through Stripe payment links with a webhook that activates the service. Machines meet an x402 v2 gateway: a request without payment gets a 402 response naming the price in USDC, the network and the payee; the client pays and retries with the payment header. A manifest on each domain lists every priced endpoint. Separately, an issuance spine under test pairs permissioned tokens on EVM with multi-purpose tokens, credentials and permissioned domains on XRPL, plus a possession-evidence engine.

The public facilitator we tested settles on test networks and other chains, not Base mainnet, so the gateway answers every paid retry with the challenge again and charges nothing until a mainnet facilitator is configured. That is a deliberate fail-closed choice.

Every row is a ledger row: the label, the evidence method and the command are in the published ledger.

Prices are configuration, not code, and are listed publicly. Payment credentials are worker secrets. Receipts are stored per settlement with the transaction reference. Contract code is labelled research until an audit exists, and the perimeter statement in the colophon applies to every rail.

What the rails charge today, and what is waiting on a gate.

Obtain a facilitator key; exercise one endpoint end to end on a test network from a throwaway wallet before touching mainnet; bring the estate gateway up as a Worker instead of a tunnel; price organization seats.