When software spends money on its own,
there's no way to undo a bad payment.

Stablecoin and AI-agent payments are irreversible — once sent, the money is gone. No chargeback, no dispute, no escrow. In July 2026 the industry standardized how agents pay: the x402 Foundation launched under the Linux Foundation with Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Circle, Coinbase and Google at the table — and its charter says nothing about what happens when a payment goes wrong. Visa and Mastercard add chargebacks only when a card stays in the loop. Recourse is the recourse layer for the payments that are truly card-free — agent-to-agent, x402, on-chain, peer-to-peer. We don't move the money; we make it safe to move.

The trust layer, as building blocks.

Everything an autonomous agent needs to move money safely — exposed as a clean API and a 5-line SDK. Use one primitive or all four.

Built for software that spends money on its own.

AI-agent companies call our API instead of paying directly.

Our customer is the developer building an autonomous agent — shopping, procurement, data/API buying. Their agent moves real money with no human watching. Five lines change that.

payVendor(vendor, 50_USDC)   // irreversible. no recourse.

npm install @recourse/sdk

const recourse = new Recourse({ apiKey })

// pay through escrow instead of sending money you can't get back
const p = await recourse.pay({ to: vendor, amount: "50" })
await recourse.dispute(p.id)              // bad delivery → refund
const { score, decision } = await recourse.check(vendor, "50")

Two ways to plug in.

In every case the customer is the team building the agent — they integrate once and pay the take rate; the end-user is the one protected.

On partnerships: we're compatible with the open standards the ecosystem is adopting (x402, AP2/ACP) — that's how we plug in without anyone's permission. Formal partnerships (e.g. a recommended-facilitator listing) are a go-to-market goal on the roadmap, not a current claim.

Watch an AI agent get scammed — and recover. Then watch the network learn.

Run a payment. The escrow holds, the agent disputes a bad delivery, and a panel of three AI judges rules in seconds — escalating to a human arbiter who co-signs when confidence is low. The agent is refunded, and the outcome updates The Recourse Score, which every other agent on the network now inherits.

The Recourse Score is the moat.

Anyone can ship an escrow contract. The defensible asset is The Recourse Score — a credit score for autonomous commerce, built from every dispute outcome across the network (above). It only works if you're neutral across rails, which Stripe / Circle / Coinbase structurally can't be — they each own a rail. That's exactly why Visa, sitting between issuer and acquirer, is the trust layer — not the banks.

And the score is already a product with a price: the basic score is free (the funnel), while machines pay $0.01 per premium trust report — over x402, today — and the score's real power is that it's enforced: it gates every payment, sets the protection fee, and decides who qualifies for guaranteed instant settlement. See the live Score Network — 50 counterparties, updating in real time →

We don't charge for escrow. We charge for risk borne.

Escrow is a smart contract — near-free, so we price it that way. The fee scales with the loss we prevent, not the money we hold. And the loss is large: a bad payment is a 100% loss, a card chargeback costs a merchant up to 3.4× the transaction, and businesses lose ~$4.60 per $1 of fraud. Against that, 0.6–1.5% to make a payment recoverable is cheap — and it's below Escrow.com (0.9–3.25%) and card interchange (~1.8%).

Two-sided revenue, like a card network. The agent (payer) pays a protection fee for escrow + dispute + refund. The vendor (payee) pays an instant-settlement fee when they opt to be paid now and we front + guarantee it — factoring their receivable. Whoever gets the benefit pays.

Comps: Escrow.com 0.89–3.25% · card interchange ~1.81% avg · chargeback all-in cost ~3.4× face · $3.75–$4.61 lost per $1 of fraud (2025).

From working demo to the default trust layer.