IXO Pay Facilitator

The IXO Pay Facilitator is the service that takes payment for decisions made by oracles on IXO. A customer agrees to pay when it sends a claim. The facilitator holds that payment while the oracle works, and moves money only after the decision engine has delivered a signed decision. It also pays people out: IXO's pros cash out their credit through it.

Read this page to choose a way to pay, to see where the money goes and what IXO takes, and to decide whether you need IXO's facilitator or your own payouts facilitator.

Nothing is charged before a decision

Every payment follows the same three steps:

1. Offer and verify. The oracle asks the facilitator for an offer, the customer signs a payment, and the facilitator checks it. It reserves the price, holds the card or stores the signed transfer. No money moves yet.
2. Decide. The oracle produces its facts and the decision engine decides. The engine signs a receipt for each claim.
3. Settle. The oracle hands the receipts to the facilitator, and only then does money move.

A claim that never gets a receipt is released and nothing is paid. A reservation lapses 24 hours after verify. An oracle can extend it while a claim waits for human review (up to 30 days), or release it early when it knows no decision will come. A decision the engine marks unusable is still a delivered decision, and it is paid.

Three ways to pay

Which ways an oracle offers is set by IXO's plan for that oracle, kept by the decision engine. On mainnet all three are live: PAY on cosmos:ixo-5, card in Stripe live mode and USDC on Base (eip155:8453). Testnet and devnet use Stripe test mode and Base Sepolia (eip155:84532).

PAY: IXO-managed oracles only

PAY is IXO's credit: 1 PAY = 1 USD, on chain as upay (1 PAY = 1,000,000 upay). The facilitator offers PAY only when IXO's plan marks the oracle as IXO-managed. A third-party oracle is never paid in PAY.

The payer's credit sits in the admin account of their subscription. The payer signs a payment delegation once: a UCAN that names the facilitator, a spending cap and the oracles it may pay. Each minute the facilitator sends one IXO chain transaction under the payer's send permission. It pays the oracle's share to the oracle's payee address and IXO's take to IXO's revenue account. IXO never holds the oracle's share.

USDC on Base: payer to owner

USDC on Base uses x402's standard exact scheme, so any standard x402 client for EVM chains can pay. The payer signs a USDC transfer authorization (EIP-3009) to the oracle owner's Base address, the one IXO's plan for the oracle names. Verify checks it and moves nothing. After the decision, IXO's relayer submits the transfer and pays the gas. The USDC goes straight from the payer to the owner: IXO never holds it. The payment counts as paid once Base marks its block safe.

IXO's fee is collected separately. The oracle owner approves IXO's fee address once, for a bounded amount (a few months of fees, topped up, never unlimited). Each minute the facilitator pulls the fees due from the address the customers paid. No fee is ever more than the payment it belongs to. If a pull keeps failing (allowance or balance too low), those fees are invoiced and USDC is switched off for that oracle until the owner fixes it. The smallest USDC charge is $0.01.

Card: the owner's own Stripe

The oracle owner sets up a Stripe account connected to IXO's Stripe platform, in the Decision Console. The payer saves a card once. When a claim is accepted, the facilitator places a hold on the payer's card as a charge on the owner's Stripe account. It captures the hold once every claim in the offer has its decision, and IXO's fee is taken as a Stripe application fee. A hold with no decision is cancelled. Card needs at least 50¢ per decision (Stripe's minimum capture).

Cash-out for IXO's pros

Pros who earn PAY credit on asks.world can turn it into money through IXO's facilitator:

1. Quote. The pro picks an amount, a method and a country. Methods on mainnet: USDC on Base to their own wallet, or their bank account through a Stripe account in their name.
2. ID check. Every cash-out needs a verified identity credential. There is no way around it.
3. One signature. The pro signs one transaction. It converts the PAY into the same amount of USDC on the IXO chain, in their own account, and lets the facilitator take exactly that amount, once.
4. Pay out. The facilitator takes the converted amount and pays the pro from IXO's own funds: its Base USDC wallet or its Stripe balance. It then returns the converted amount to the converter's treasury.

On mainnet a cash-out is $10 to $1,000, one at a time, and there is no fee. If a payout fails, the pro can retry it or ask for the taken amount back.

Who does what

A company that pays its own people (suppliers, couriers, field workers) for approved claims runs its own payouts facilitator. It is the same software in payouts-only mode, installed with one command on Node 24 LTS or newer.

IXO's facilitator runs at these hosts. GET /supported on each lists the ways to pay it takes.

Next steps