Tollgate

Agents can now transact autonomously but lack financial guardrails: they silently overspend across multi-step tasks, issue concurrent duplicate payments for the same job, lose state when a provider dies mid-transaction, and assert rather than prove that a payment happened. The x402 protocol lets an agent discover and pay for a priced resource with no human in the loop, but x402 is only a settlement mechanism and does not solve governance. Tollgate is the control plane that sits between any agent and any priced resource - inference, storage, compute or data - enforcing routing, budgeting, settlement and proof deterministically. Every payment request passes through policy evaluation before provider selection, budget reservation, settlement simulation, ledger recording and replay generation, with no routing decision resting on probabilistic inference. Budget reservation locks funds before dispatch to prevent concurrent overspend, and discrete policy gates cover availability, trust and idempotency, backed by an append-only audit log.