Creates or recovers an ArisPay account for delegated custody and provisions a USDC payer wallet in one call (side effects: registers the email, creates a Coinbase CDP-managed wallet, writes credentials to ~/.payagent/config.json on this machine). Moves no money — it does NOT spend funds. Idempotent: re-running with the same email recovers the existing account and its wallets. Not needed in self-custody mode: if PAYAGENT_PRIVATE_KEY is set, skip setup entirely — pay works with the local key alone.

Searches the ArisPay marketplace for paid APIs by capability or plain-language intent, optionally budget-bounded (integer cents). Read-only — spends no money, needs no API key. Returns ranked candidates with endpoint URL, price in cents, health and verification flags. Select this to FIND an endpoint; then inspect to price a specific URL, then pay to call it.

Fetches an x402-protected URL WITHOUT paying and reports its price, asset, network, and payment requirements. Read-only — spends no money, sends no payment header, needs no API key or account. Always safe. Select this before pay to know exactly what a resource costs.

SPENDS REAL MONEY — on-chain and irreversible. The complete machine payment path: makes the HTTP request, and if the server answers 402, selects the supported asset/network variant (USDC on Base/Ethereum/Polygon; delegated mode also settles Solana and BNB Chain variants), validates policy, pays, retries the request, and returns the response plus a structured machine-readable receipt. Requires an idempotencyKey: re-calling with a key that already paid returns the cached receipt and does NOT pay again. Mode selection: PAYAGENT_PRIVATE_KEY set → signs locally (self-custody; wallet balance is the only cap); otherwise pays through the stored ArisPay agent whose per-tx/daily/monthly mandate is enforced server-side BEFORE signing. Use inspect first to see the price. Do not use for ordinary unpaid HTTP requests.

Read-only: shows the active payment identity — the stored ArisPay agent (delegated) or the PAYAGENT_PRIVATE_KEY-derived address (self-custody) — with its USDC deposit address, on-chain balance, and (delegated) spend-mandate limits. Spends no money, never pays. Select this to find where to send USDC, to confirm a deposit landed, or when a payment fails.

Read-only: lists recent payments — the server-side activity feed in delegated mode (newest first), or locally recorded receipts in self-custody mode. Spends no money. Select this to reconcile what was paid, retrieve a past receipt, or audit an agent's spending.

SPENDS REAL MONEY — 1¢ (USDC, Base mainnet) per UNCACHED call; a still-valid cached artifact returns WITHOUT spending, and an unknown resource is answered free. Buys ArisPay Signal: recent signed probe evidence about an x402 resource (did a real paid probe settle and deliver?) as an arispay.signal.v1 artifact, verified against the published JWKS. Use it BEFORE a material first payment to an unfamiliar resource, or after cached evidence expires. The decision denominator is CUMULATIVE exposure before the artifact expires — planned spend across all intended calls, or the expected cost of one failure, whichever is larger — not the price of the next call: an agent planning 100 calls to a 1¢ endpoint should check; an agent making a single 1¢ call should not. Skip it when cumulative exposure is at or below the 1¢ check price. Returns signed observational evidence with explicit freshness — NOT a guarantee, insurance, or endorsement. Network side effect: one HTTPS request to the Signal endpoint; payment side effect: the 1¢ x402 purchase on uncached calls.