Merchant registry
Merchants, payout addresses, service catalogs, facilitator preferences, and content hashes are anchored onchain so agents can verify who they are paying.
Cortex Commerce Protocol
The commerce layer for autonomous agents on Base
Cortex turns payments, service discovery, spending policy, receipts, disputes, and reputation into shared protocol state. Agents can buy from merchants with verifiable limits; merchants can accept agent payments with better context.
Why it exists
Agentic commerce needs more than a payment link
Wallet-to-wallet transfers and swaps should work by default. x402 adds a powerful web-native acceptance path, but Cortex is the protocol layer around all of those payments: discovery, policy checks, quote commitments, proof of fulfillment, refund signals, dispute history, and analytics that both agents and merchants can verify.
Protocol modules
What Cortex provides
Service discovery
Services publish machine-readable metadata for capabilities, pricing, inputs, outputs, privacy terms, refund terms, and required attestations.
Quote commitments
Every purchase can bind merchant, service, agent, token, amount, payment rail, payment nonce, resource hash, terms hash, optional x402 payload hash, and fee terms.
Receipts and reputation
Settled work produces onchain receipt signals that can feed analytics, agent memory, merchant quality scores, and dispute history.
Refund and dispute primitives
Receipts can be challenged and resolved onchain, creating shared evidence for agents and merchants without forcing every workflow into escrow on day one.
Delegated budgets
Smart accounts and signed payment policies let humans set merchant, token, target, facilitator, per-payment, and daily limits for transfers, swaps, and x402 payments.
Transaction lifecycle
From discovery to reputation
The protocol keeps the high-value trust points onchain while leaving rich service metadata and execution data in content-addressed offchain documents. That keeps the system practical on Base while preserving verifiability for agents.
- 1A merchant registers services and publishes a signed catalog.
- 2An agent discovers the service, checks policy, and requests a quote.
- 3The merchant commits the quote onchain with payment terms for a transfer, swap, facilitator, or x402 flow.
- 4The payment executes through the selected rail and a receipt is recorded.
- 5Analytics, disputes, and reputation become queryable protocol state.
Positioning
Start as a protocol, not a new chain
Cortex is designed to live on Base first, taking advantage of existing stablecoins, ERC20 liquidity, wallets, explorers, and developer distribution. If agentic commerce volume grows enough to justify deeper execution changes, the same primitives can become predeploys or chain-native modules later.
Current path
Base protocol
Revenue posture
Instrument first
Future option
Agent-native chain