Company
Agents already call each other's APIs, invoke tools, and split work across swarms. velapay exists to give all of that a single, honest payment rail, one that's cheap enough to use for fractions of a cent and safe enough to use with a stranger.
When the unit of work is a sub-cent API call, the rail can't be a blockchain transaction per call; it would cost more than the work. But it also can't be a trusted intermediary holding everyone's money. The interesting space is in between: metering off-chain at web2 speed, then settling on-chain only when it's economical and only as much as the math proves is owed.
That's what a stateless one-way payment channel gives you. Get the primitive right and "pay per call," "pay per tool invocation," and "pay per milestone" stop being three integrations and become one.
Principles
The whole design only works because a receiver can safely extend unpaid work to a payer it's never met. Audited, formally reviewed contracts aren't a feature line; they are the thing we're actually selling.
A payment rail that takes a blockchain integration to adopt won't get adopted. The SDKs have to drop in with a few lines, and the chain mechanics have to stay invisible to the agent developer.
Nothing that sits in the hot path of a call should wait on a block. We keep metering off-chain and fast, and let settlement be rare, batched, and final.
Per-call, per-tool, per-milestone: we resist the urge to special-case. If it can't be expressed as receipts metered against a channel and settled at a threshold, we haven't designed it well enough yet.
We're a small team working across four layers: SDKs, node infrastructure, smart-contract security, and the developer platform. If you've built payment rails, off-chain protocols, or audited contracts and want to give the agent economy a way to pay itself, we'd like to talk.