How MotherShy works
One page, the whole mechanic. There are three moving parts: the trust chain, the wall, and the payment rail.
The trust chain (identity → authorization)
An agent proves who it is and that it's allowed to pay for this site with a single signed object — an envelope sent in an HTTP header.
The chain has two links, both verifiable offline against a pinned public root:
- Root → agent — the Mother derives the agent's key and signs its birth certificate (
cert). This is the agent's identity. - Agent → request — the agent signs the canonical request (site, timestamp, amount). This is the agent authorizing this specific access.
On top of that sits the capability (cap) — a scoped spend key minted by the Mother. It says: "this agent may spend up to N micro-USD at site S, until time T." The certificate is identity; the capability is authorization. A wall requires both.
Root ──(signs birth cert)──▶ Agent ──(signs request)──▶ Wall
└──(presents scoped capability)──▶ WallThe wall
A wall is a small piece of code a publisher drops in front of their existing site. It reads the X-MotherShy header on every request and makes one decision:
- Valid envelope, scoped to this site → pass through to the origin (the agent is authenticated and authorized to pay).
- No header → classify by User-Agent: humans and search bots pass free; un-enrolled AI agents get a
402pointing them at enrollment. - Malformed / tampered / wrong-site → rejected fail-closed (
400/401/403).
The wall is keyless and offline: it pins only the Mother's public root. It never phones home, never holds a secret, and can gate traffic even if MotherShy itself is unreachable.
The payment rail
When a gated agent is asked to pay, the money doesn't flow through MotherShy. The wall issues an x402 PAYMENT-REQUIRED challenge; the agent's funder settles funder → publisher over an existing rail (x402, MPP, or Pay Per Crawl). MotherShy earns on the subscription — never a cut of your content revenue.
Agent ──402 challenge──▶ Funder ──settle (USDC, on-chain)──▶ Publisher
└──▶ facilitator records txThe six wall form factors
The wall's trust core is byte-for-byte identical across every environment. Publishers pick whichever matches their stack:
| Form factor | Runtime | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Worker | V8 isolate | Sites already behind Cloudflare |
| WordPress plugin | PHP | WordPress sites |
| Node.js middleware | Node | Express / Node apps |
| Nginx / Go binary | Go | Self-hosted, any backend |
| Vercel edge | V8/edge | Next.js on Vercel |
| Netlify edge | Deno | Sites on Netlify |
See Install the wall for all six.