ln-church-agent

Your agent will hit a 402 paywall in the wild.

Will it inspect, decide, pay, recover, verify, and continue — or freeze?

ln-church-agent is a buyer-side HTTP 402 runtime and agent-commerce surface inspector for autonomous agents.
It helps agents inspect paid-action surfaces, distinguish executable payment rails from higher-order commerce protocols, and prove real paid execution across L402, x402, and MPP with receipts, policy checks, HATEOAS recovery, and traceable outcomes.

In v1.9.0+, the inspect layer explicitly classifies emerging agent-commerce surfaces such as OKX Agent Payments Protocol (APP), Google AP2, and ACP without executing payment logic. These protocols are treated as observable commerce / authorization patterns unless they expose a concrete HTTP 402-compatible settlement path.

Core Doctrine

Do not spend even one LLM token on what the agent should not need to reason about.

ln-church-agent moves payment plumbing out of the model's reasoning loop and into a deterministic buyer-side runtime.

The SDK handles mechanical HTTP 402 concerns such as:

• payment-rail inspection,
• challenge parsing,
• policy checks,
• payment execution,
• HATEOAS recovery,
• receipt verification,
• evidence capture.

The LLM remains responsible for the higher-level economic decisions:

• whether the counterparty should be trusted,
• whether payment is justified,
• whether the expected outcome was delivered,
• and whether the endpoint should be reused.

What it does

Most payment SDKs help agents pay.
ln-church-agent helps agents complete the whole paid-action loop:

Probe → Inspect → Decide → Pay → Execute → Verify → Trace

It is designed for agents that must:

• Inspect HTTP 402 challenges before committing funds.
• Choose between L402, x402, MPP, or safe-stop paths based on local policy.
• Execute paid actions through policy-aware runtime controls (budgets, trust).
• Recover through HATEOAS-style next actions if a flow is interrupted.
• Verify receipts and semantic outcomes after payment.
• Report trace evidence to a public sandbox or local observer.
• Record goal-conditioned attempts and their outcomes for future optimization.

🧠 What this runtime is

• Generic Buyer-Side Runtime: A pure client-side execution engine that keeps your AI agent's reasoning loop clean by abstracting away the HTTP 402 negotiation layer.
• Agent Commerce Surface Inspector: Classifies emerging commerce and authorization layers such as OKX APP, AP2, ACP, and UCP separately from executable settlement rails.
• Open-Web 402 Interoperability: Natively supports Base64URL JSON headers, CAIP-2 network routing, and multi-chain execution out of the box.
• Reference Sandbox Support: Optionally integrates with the LN Church observation network for public benchmarking, trace reporting, and discovery workflows.
• Stable Interface: An unchanging developer API surface that safely absorbs the constant fluctuations of upstream protocol drafts.

Paid Surface Observer

ln-church-agent is not only a payment executor but also a powerful paid surface observer. The inspect command enumerates all presented settlement_options alongside the selected_settlement_option (the one the SDK would choose if executing). It cleanly separates capabilities: what can be observed versus what is natively supported for execution (execution_support).

Agent Commerce surfaces like APP, AP2, and ACP are treated strictly as commerce/authorization layers. They are processed as inspect-only, meaning the SDK will intentionally avoid automatic execution and explicitly highlight missing settlement parameters (missing_information) if clear rails are undeclared.

LN Church Observatory Opt-in: ln-church-agent can inspect payment surfaces locally. LN Church Observatory is the public observation layer where redacted observations, execution evidence, and interoperabil

... View full README on GitHub