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Four minutes, if you'd rather watch.
THE AI ECONOMY'S MISSING BACKBONE · or watch the 9-minute deep dive →
Not a credit card taped to a box on the internet — a company your agent operates and you own: a budget with a hard ceiling, a bank, books, and a kill switch that actually works. Built by a licensed money-services business and fintech that's spent a decade innovating in payments and banking.
curl -fsSL bytecharter.com/agent.md Your agent reads the manual and tells you what to do next — "sign up here, set my budget, we're almost live." You set the limits; it does the work.
$ charter agent create invoice-runner \ --budget 5.00/day \ --models "claude-*" \ --expires 7d
Your agent gets a legal company, a treasury, and a bank account on licensed rails — and spends from a budget you set. Every cent it spends, or earns, is logged under its own name.
Each agent gets its own key and its own ceiling, plus a kill switch that works. A runaway loop stops at its limit, not at your bank balance.
When your agent starts earning, we make it official: a Wyoming company your agent operates and you own — invoices, books, taxes, all filed like any real business.
THE AI ECONOMY'S MISSING BACKBONE · or watch the 9-minute deep dive →
Tens of thousands of AI agents are already running unattended — spending against someone's personal card, with no budget they respect, no company behind them, and no real off switch. It holds right up until it doesn't.
And the population is exploding. By Cloudflare's measurement, machine traffic passed human traffic on the internet for the first time this spring — and their CFO's forecast puts the gap at a thousand to one within five years. Almost none of those machines can hold a budget, sign a contract, or pay a tax.
Your whole fleet shares a raw sk-ant-… key. There is no per-agent limit, no per-agent record, and no way to know which agent spent what — or leaked what.
A retry loop at 3 a.m. spends your month's budget before breakfast. The provider's dashboard tells you afterward. Your card already knows.
An injected agent hands its credentials to whoever asked nicely. If that credential is your master key — or a wallet — the attacker owns it. Irreversibly.
Your agent gets a Wyoming LLC — a human owns it, an algorithm runs it. It's the legal structure that already exists for exactly this, and it's the entity that signs, invoices, and holds the money. Run the agent itself wherever you like; we're the legal and money layer it plugs into, not another box to rent.
Fund it once, and the company can hold, receive, and move money on licensed rails — a real business account, not a wallet screenshot. Agents spend within budget and get paid into the treasury, every payment screened and attributed. When they earn, the money comes home as bookable revenue, ready for the filing.
Every agent gets its own scoped credential — a hard budget, an autonomy level, an expiry, instant revocation. A compromised key is a capped, revocable credential, never your account or your card. Anything that touches money stays locked until you sign a consent for it. Pull the switch and the key dies and the account freezes in the same moment — the agent keeps running on its own box, but it can't move a cent. The controls sit on the money, so they hold wherever the agent runs.
“Every agent-payments startup built a wallet. Nobody built the counterparty.”
WHY THIS COMPANY EXISTSAnonymous pipes are what everyone else built. Byte Charter is permissionless but screened: any agent can walk up and pay as it goes in digital dollars (USDC, over the x402 protocol), under small limits, with every payment checked. Bigger limits are earned by putting a named human behind the keys. Know-Your-Agent, in tiers, with real numbers.
| Tier | Who signs | Per-request cap | Daily cap | Screening | Statement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| T0 · Open doorx402 / USDC, no account | No one — wallet pays per request | $1.00 | $25 / wallet | Wallet screening + sanctions, every payment | — |
| T1 · KeyedKeyKeeper credential | Verified human principal | $10.00 | $250 / fleet | Principal verified + payment screening | Monthly |
| T2 · Fleetbusiness account | KYB'd company | Custom | Custom, per sub-key | Full KYB + continuous monitoring | Monthly + export |
Caps shown are launch defaults, not promises of credit. Every payment — including the anonymous tier — is screened at the edge. If you are building something that needs the screening to be missing, we are not your platform.
Byte Charter is operated by Byte Federal, Inc. — over a decade moving money online and offline: cash in the cloud and cash in the physical world, across banking, crypto, and payments, under compliance rules that never stop moving. An evolving agent-crypto-banking-payments space isn't new terrain for us; it's the terrain we've always worked. No adjectives, just the record:
Think of the budget as seed capital, and yourself as the angel — capital at risk, deployed with judgment, most bets modest and a few that surprise you. We don't promise your agents will make money. We promise that when they do, it's real business — invoiced from an entity, booked in a ledger, reportable at year-end. Not screenshots of a wallet and a tax problem.
Receive, not just spend. Agents invoice clients and accept payment into the fleet treasury — attributed to the agent that earned it.
A company for your agents. Wyoming LLC formation, human-owned and algorithm-operated — the legal structure that already exists for exactly this. (Roadmap, Q4.)
Books an accountant will accept. Every cent in and out, exportable. Revenue that survives an audit is the only kind worth having.
Wyoming law already recognizes algorithmically managed companies — a human founder can stand up an LLC whose operations are run by its algorithms. An autonomous company isn't our metaphor. It's a statute. We build on it.
WYO. STAT. § 17-31-101 et seq. — Decentralized Autonomous Organization Supplement (2021). Human-owned. Algorithm-operated. Legal.
A scoped key and real controls. No entity yet — money stays locked.
The real thing — a company, a treasury, and a bank. One-time formation fee covers the state filing.
Scale, KYB'd — custom caps, custom take.
How we're paid, stated plainly: a flat monthly subscription; a one-time formation fee that covers your company's state filing and setup; a published margin on money that moves — a few basis points on payments, plus the spread on any crypto-to-cash conversion; and, like any bank, net interest on the treasury balances your company holds with our partner bank. No hidden markups; the fee schedule is the fee schedule.
Point your AI at a business, seed it with a budget, and set the autonomy dial — from “ask me for everything” to “run within your means.” When it's ready for the real economy, flip the switch: we incorporate the company, stand up its treasury, and keep the books. You bring the capital and the judgment. We make sure the company your agent runs is a real one.