What Net Payments is (and is not)#

An agent that invokes a capability needs to answer commercial questions the transport layer can't: what does this cost? did I actually pay for what I got? am I allowed to spend this? what do I bill? Net Payments answers those by signing the commercial facts around an invocation. It does not move money.

The category line#

Net standardizes the commercial facts around capability invocation; it does not intermediate the money.

x402 (the payment wire) moves the funds on-chain. Net signs the facts around them: who the provider is, what a capability costs, whether a payment verified and to what depth, what spend policy allowed, and what was billed.

What it is NOT#

This is the load-bearing half of the positioning. Net Payments does not:

• custody funds — no wallet, no balance, no escrow;
• process or clear payments — x402 + the chain do that;
• issue invoices, determine taxes, or run KYB / sanctions / identity checks — providers own those in their own systems;
• carry customer PII — see the data boundary below.

If a page (or your mental model) has Net holding a balance or running a compliance check, it's wrong.

The doctrines that shape everything#

1. x402 is the wire; Net signs around it. Net envelopes wrap x402 structures — they never replace, translate, or re-encode them.
2. Byte-preservation is law. x402 documents ride as base64 of their original bytes; Net never re-serializes a received x402 doc. See x402 and Net.
3. Non-custodial by construction. Identity keys are not settlement keys, and there is no raw-bytes signing path. See Non-custodial signing.
4. Verification is a tier, not a boolean. A facilitator receipt is observed; depth and finality come from an independent on-chain check. See Verification tiers.
5. The policy engine decides, not the model. Spend policy runs before money leaves; handlers never see an unpaid call. See Spend policy & approvals.
6. Enabling a network is config, not code. See Networks.

The data boundary#

Net payment, billing, lifecycle, and failure objects carry references, commitments, signatures, quote IDs, verification outcomes, and policy decisions — not customer tax IDs, billing addresses, shipping addresses, or KYB records. This holds by construction: identities on the wire are public keys (entity IDs), the invocation input is carried as a hash, amounts are opaque atomic-unit integers, and there is no PII field on any envelope. Provider and customer records live in provider or partner systems.

Terms acceptance, where used, means a signed acceptance commitment plus a terms hash/ID — Net does not host terms text, validate legal authority, store customer identity, or adjudicate enforceability.

What's reserved (not shipped)#

Named here so you don't build on them: disputes / refunds (net.payment.dispute@1 is a reserved tag with no semantics), RFQ / dynamic pricing, accounts / postpaid (Mode E), and inbound HTTP-402 serving (only the outbound client ships). These are roadmap, not behavior.