The x402 facilitator

x402 makes an ordinary HTTP request payable: a client that calls a paid endpoint gets back 402 Payment Required, signs a payment, and retries with it. The facilitator is the HTTP service that turns that signed payment into a real, settled payment on the Canton Network — so your server never has to speak to a ledger, hold a wallet, or run a node. Your server (the resource server) just hands each payment to the facilitator, which does exactly two things with it: POST /v2/verify checks a signed payment against your terms without submitting or reserving anything; POST /v2/settle then executes it on Canton and returns the update id.

Non-custodial by construction

Canton settles in three steps — prepare, sign, execute — and that split is what makes the facilitator non-custodial. The payer does prepare and sign with its own key, without going through the facilitator. The facilitator only ever performs the final execute of a transaction the payer already signed: it never sees a private key, and it cannot move funds without that signature.

The payment scheme

• exact-canton — the payer transfers Canton Coin (Amulet) directly to your party; you receive CC.

GET /v2/supported is the authority on what a given facilitator accepts — the network id and the asset to pay in.

How you get paid

Settlements land directly at your Canton party — the payout party of the project your API key belongs to. The payer transfers Amulet (CC) straight to it; the facilitator holds no balance, so there is nothing to withdraw. That relies on your payout party having a TransferPreapproval: to a party without one, Amulet delivers each payment as a transfer offer that the party has to accept before the CC is its own (see What settlement does). Completed settlements show up on the Settlements page of the merchant dashboard.

Your API key is the facilitator credential

A key you create on the API keys page of the merchant dashboard is what your server sends as Authorization: Bearer to /v2/verify and /v2/settle. You can create and rotate keys in the dashboard yourself — no facilitator redeploy — and the key itself is never stored: what is kept is its hash, plus its sk_live_/sk_test_ prefix and last four characters so you can tell your keys apart. A revocation can take up to a couple of minutes to take effect.

Next

Getting started takes you from a fresh account to a paid endpoint.