XGuard — Universal Paid AI Agent + Secretless Gateway

Canonical production API

https://api.xguardgate.com

Canonical identity — v5.1.0: XGuard Universal Paid AI Agent + Secretless Gateway. Agents discover real tools, get a signed price, pay per request through x402 v2 USDC, and receive a signed receipt plus ProofRail evidence. Secretless Egress keeps reusable upstream credentials outside agent context. See CANONICAL_IDENTITY.md.

The primary no-account path is:

direct tool call → signed quote + HTTP 402 → verify + settle
                 → controlled execution → signed receipt + ProofRail

The first paid production tool is xguard.web.fetch: bounded public HTTPS GET/HEAD with SSRF protection, public-DNS validation, safe manual redirects, content/type/size/time limits, caching, stable errors, source timestamps and content hashes. Search, AI generation/routing and data-query tools are explicitly disabled until real connectors are configured.

Five-minute quickstart

No account or SDK is needed. The shortest path is one request; XGuard creates the signed quote and returns the standard x402 challenge without contacting the target:

curl -i https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/tools/web.fetch \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com/"}'

# Response: HTTP 402 + Payment-Required + X-XGuard-Quote.
# Sign the challenge with an x402 v2 payer and retry the identical request with
# Payment-Signature and X-XGuard-Quote. XGuard settles before execution.

# Optional machine discovery and free preparation:
curl -sS https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/capabilities
curl -sS https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/pricing
curl -sS https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/payment/readiness

# Optional free guard: validates HTTPS/SSRF/DNS/payment readiness without contacting the target
curl -sS https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/preflight \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com/","testnet":true}'

curl -sS https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/pricing/quote \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com/","testnet":true}'

# A standalone signed quote remains available for clients that need a price preview.
# Send its compact `quote` as X-XGuard-Quote; the response is the same HTTP 402.
curl -i https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/tools/web.fetch/testnet \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -H 'X-XGuard-Quote: <signed-quote>' \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com/"}'

The final payment payload is standard x402 v2; it can be produced by any compatible wallet/client. XGuard additionally requires the server-recommended payment-identifier returned in the quote and challenge. An exact retry returns the stored result and does not settle twice.

MCP

curl -i https://api.xguardgate.com/mcp \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"xguard.web.fetch","arguments":{"url":"https://example.com/"}}}'

A2A

curl -i https://api.xguardgate.com/a2a \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' -H 'a2a-version: 1.0.0' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"SendMessage","params":{"message":{"messageId":"fetch-1","role":"ROLE_USER","parts":[{"data":{"action":"xguard.web.fetch","input":{"url":"https://example.com/"}}}]}}}'

TypeScript and Python discovery

const capabilities = await fetch("https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/capabilities").then(r => r.json());
const quote = await fetch("https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/pricing/quote", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: { "content-type": "application/json" },
  body: JSON.stringify({ url: "https://example.com/", testnet: true }),
}).then(r => r.json());

import requests

capabilities = requests.get("https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/capabilities", timeout=10).json()
quote = requests.post(
    "https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/pricing/quote",
    json={"url": "https://example.com/", "testnet": True},
    timeout=10,
).json()

Canonical discovery surfaces: /mcp, /a2a, /.well-known/agent-card.json, /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/mcp, /.well-known/payment-manifest, /.well-known/x402-facilitator.json, /openapi.json, /llms.txt, /v1/capabilities, /v1/preflight, /v1/pricing, /v1/payment/readiness, /v1/health, and /v1/ready.

Base Sepolia is integration-only and every test settlement is recorded as environment=test, revenue=false. Production quotes use Base Mainnet and the configured production recipient/facilitator; revenue is recorded only for an external production settlement with transaction evidence.

xguard.web.fetch is the mandatory guarded execution choke point: its first direct call returns the input-bound quote and 402 automatically, and every paid retry requires x402 v2 settlement before the target is contacted. xguard.preflight and the standalone quote endpoint remain optional free preparation. When an operator keeps a reusable upstream credential only in XGuard, Secretless Egress is likewise the required credential-backed path for that environment.

Secretless credential path

XGuard keeps reusable upstream credentials out of AI agents. Operators store a Stripe, GitHub, OpenAI, Anthropic, Slack, Notion, Cloudflare, Gemini or custom API credential once, then give the agent only a short-lived scoped XGuard capability.

Operator secret
     ↓
Encrypted XGuard credential vault
     ↓
Scoped capability
     ↓
AI agent
     ↓
XGuard Secretless Egress
     ↓
credential injected server-side
     ↓
upstream API

The agent never receives the reusable upstream credential.

XGuard becomes an actual choke point when an operator keeps the reusable credential only in XGuard and delegates capabilities instead of redistributing that credential. XGuard does not claim control over unrelated Internet traffic.

Why Secretless Egress

A reusable bearer token inside an autonomous agent can be copied, logged, placed in context, reused outside the intended request or leaked to an untrusted tool. XGuard changes the primitive from secret possession to scoped capability possession.

The current egress boundary provides:

• encrypted reusable credential storage;
• provider presets for OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Stripe, Slack, Notion, Cloudflare and Gemini;
• custom header-based credentials restricted to explicit public HTTPS hosts;
• short-lived capabilities;
• exact HTTPS origin binding;
• path-prefix allowlists;
• HTTP method allowlists;
• maximum call counts;
• Usage Credit billing before secret release and before outbound network egress;
• no automatic credential forwarding across redirects;
• private/local target blocking;
• automatic Idempotency-Key injection for unsafe methods;
• no blind automatic replay after network ambiguity;
• MCP discovery and egress execution without exposing credential provisioning to model context.

Egress API

Machine-readable contract:

GET https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/egress
GET https://api.xguardgate.com/.well-known/xguard-egress.json
GET https://api.xguardgate.com/.well-known/xguard-egress-key.json
GET https://api.xguardgate.com/v1/egress/providers

1. Operator stores a reusable credential

Credential provisioning is intentionally an operator API, not an MCP tool.

POST /v1/egress/credentials
X-XGuard-Key: <usage-credit-key>
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "provider": "github",
  "value": "<github-token>",
  "label": "production-github",
  "allowed_paths": ["/repos/"],
  "allowed_methods": ["GET", "POST"]
}

XGuard returns only credential metadata such as xcred_...; the reusable secret is not returned.

2. Operator issues a short capability

POST /v1/egress/capabilities
X-XGuard-Key: <usage-credit-key>
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "credential_id": "xcred_...",
  "target_origin": "https://api.github.com",
  "path_prefix": "/repos/",
  "allowed_methods": ["GET", "POST"],
  "ttl_seconds": 300,
  "max_calls": 10
}

The returned xgc_... capability is what the agent receives.

3. Agent executes without the upstream secret

POST /v1/egress/fetch
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "capability": "xgc_...",
  "target": "https://api.github.com/repos/org/repo/issues",
  "method": "POST",
  "body_json": {
    "title": "Example"
  }
}

XGuard validates capability scope and billing, injects the GitHub credential server-side, sends one HTTPS request and never exposes the reusable GitHub token to the agent.

Pricing contract:

GET /v1/egress/pricing

The current configuration consumes 1 XGuard Usage Credit per authorized credential-backed egress attempt. Billing is committed before credential decryption and before outbound network egress. If billing cannot commit, no upstream request is sent.

MCP

Canonical MCP endpoint:

https://api.xguardgate.com/mcp

Agent-facing tools include:

xguard_secretless_egress
xguard_egress_fetch
xguard_action_rail

Reusable credential creation is deliberately not exposed as an MCP tool.

Action Rail underneath

The no-account paid-tool path and Secretless Egress are the primary product boundaries. XGuard Action Rail remains available underneath for stronger execution controls around payments, purchases, bookings, messages, deployments, deletes, API writes and tool calls.

POST /v1/mandates
POST /v1/actions/permits
POST /v1/actions/execute
GET  /v1/actions/permits/{permit_id}

Action Rail adds scoped mandates, request-bound cryptographic permits, replay rejection, durable execution state and receipts.

Universal and Edge deployment

For operator-controlled infrastructure XGuard can also be placed in front of an origin:

Internet / Ingress
      ↓
XGuard Universal Gate
      ↓
private origin