Payments & Settlement

Settlement is the atomic unit of the Tokelio economy: an agent pays TOKE for a completed unit of work and receives a verifiable receipt.

What can be settled

• Agent tasks — a discrete job an agent executes.
• Execution fees — the cost of running a workflow step.
• API calls — per-request charges to third-party services.
• Inference — completed AI tasks and delivered results.
• Subscriptions — recurring autonomous services.

Anatomy of a settlement

await tokelio.settle({
  task: "inference:summarize",
  amount: 3.0,          // TOKE
  to: "agent:atlas",
  idempotencyKey: "job-8842", // safe to retry
  metadata: { tokens: 4200 },
});

Idempotency & retries

Agent loops fail and retry constantly. Every settlement accepts an idempotency key — replaying the same key returns the original result instead of charging twice. This makes payments safe to embed inside a retry loop.

High-frequency by design

Human rails assume a person authorizes each payment. Tokelio assumes the opposite: thousands of small, programmatic settlements per agent, per day, with no human in the loop once a budget and policy are set.

See Escrow & Collateral for settlements that must wait on a verifiable result.