# The Economic Layer for AI Agents.

Agents need wallets, not credit cards. **Model Context Protocol (MCP)** on P402 gives Claude, Cursor, and custom agents a secure wallet and an orchestration layer to negotiate, pay, and route data autonomously.

### Agent Wallet Status

- **Active**  
- **Daily Budget:** $10.00  
- **84% Remaining**  
- **Avg. Latency:** 124ms  
  -12% vs last week  
- **Budget Consumed (Today):** 16.0%

## Why P402 for MCP?

### Autonomous Payments

Enable your agent to pay for premium tools (weather, market data, high-tier LLMs) without human approval, strictly within pre-defined policies.

### Protocol Routing

Don't hardcode providers. P402 routes agent requests to the most cost-effective and healthy models in real-time.

### Semantic Guardrails

Prevent agent "hallucination loops" from draining your wallet with semantic analysis and recursive-call kill switches.

## Install in Your Environment

Three distribution paths. Pick the one that matches your client.

### Zero config

VS Code · Cursor · Windsurf

```  
ext install p402-protocol.p402  
```

Embedded MCP server bundled inside the extension. Tools appear in Copilot agent mode immediately on install — no config files, no env vars, no restart.

McpServerDefinitionProvider — spawns local node process  
Status bar: spend tracker + mode switcher  
3 sidebar views: sessions · requests · provider status

### stdio transport

Claude Desktop · JetBrains · Any MCP client

```  
npx -y @p402/mcp-server  
```

Standalone stdio MCP server. Add to your client's config file with `P402_API_KEY`. See the config snippet below.

npm: @p402/mcp-server@1.0.0

MCP Registry: io.github.Z333Q/p402

No daemon, no persistent process  
OpenAI-compatible  
REST API · Node · Python · Any HTTP client

```  
npm install @p402/sdk  
```

Drop-in replacement for direct provider calls. Change the base URL and API key — everything else stays the same.

POST /api/v2/chat/completions  
300+ models, 1 key  
USDC settlement per request

## Quick Local Setup

1. ### Initialize Agent Wallet

Create a dedicated hot wallet for your agent. We recommend keeping <$10 USDC for safety.

2. ### Define Policy

Set spending limits (e.g., $1.00/day) and allowed providers via the P402 Dashboard.

3. ### Sync MCP Server

Add the P402 MCP server to your client (Claude Desktop or Cursor) to bridge the agent to the web.

## claude\_desktop\_config.json

```  
{  
  "mcpServers": {  
    "p402": {  
      "command": "npx",  
      "args": ["-y", "@p402/mcp-server"],  
      "env": {  
        "P402_API_KEY": "p402_live_...",  
        "P402_ROUTER_URL": "https://p402.io"  
      }  
    }  
  }  
}  
```

## Environment Variables

- **`P402_API_KEY`:** Required. Your P402 API key from the dashboard.
- **`P402_ROUTER_URL`:** Optional. Defaults to `https://p402.io`. Override for self-hosted deployments.

## Available Tools

Six tools exposed over stdio MCP transport. Use them from any MCP client.

- **`p402_chat`:** Core   
  Route a prompt to the best provider. Supports cost / quality / speed / balanced modes. Settles payment per-request in USDC on Base at 1% flat fee.  
 **params:** prompt, mode?, model?, session_token?, max_tokens?

- **`p402_create_session`:** Sessions  
  Create a budget session with a USD cap. All p402_chat calls referencing this session draw from the shared budget — useful for multi-turn conversations.  
 **params:** budget_usd, label?

- **`p402_get_session`:** Sessions  
  Retrieve session status: remaining budget, total spent, request count, and expiry.  
 **params:** session_token

- **`p402_list_models`:** Discovery  
  List all 300+ routable models with provider, context window, cost per token, and availability.  
 **params:** provider?

- **`p402_compare_providers`:** Discovery  
  Side-by-side cost and latency comparison for a given model across all providers that serve it.  
 **params:** model

- **`p402_health`:** Ops  
  Router uptime, facilitator settlement status, and provider health summary.  
 **params:** none

## Infinite Scalability

As your agent fleet grows, P402 acts as the centralized **Economic Gateway**. 100 agents, 1 budget, 0 hardcoded API keys.