Frequently asked questions
Everything you need to know about how leashd handles your money, your keys, and your agents.
Is leashd custodial?
No. leashd never takes custody of your funds. Settlement happens on your own rail, between your wallet and the counterparty. The platform sits in the policy path, not the custody path.
Where do my keys live?
On your own machine. The leashd sidecar holds the wallet connection and any secrets locally. The hosted control plane signs policy and aggregates audit, and never sees a credential.
Which rails are supported?
Bitcoin Lightning and L402, Cashu ecash, and stablecoins over x402. Bind rails with priority and fall back when one is unavailable. leashd is multi-rail and BTC-first.
Does it cost anything?
The open-source sidecar is free. The hosted control plane has a free workspace plus a paid tier for larger swarms, longer audit retention, approval workflows, and alerting.
What is leashd?
leashd is the free open-source sidecar that runs on your own machine. It holds the wallet connection locally, verifies the signed policy, and enforces every rule before a payment touches a rail. It never moves funds on its own and never exposes your keys.
Does it work offline?
Yes. If the control plane is unreachable, leashd keeps enforcing the last verified policy. Your agent is never unleashed by an outage.
Is leashd a money transmitter?
No. leashd is non-custodial software that evaluates policy. It is not a bank, exchange, or money transmitter, because it never holds the funds or keys that could move money.
How does it plug into my agent?
Over MCP. leashd ships as an MCP server exposing a policy-gated pay tool, plus check_policy and get_budget. Drop it into Claude Code or any MCP host. No SDK to wire up.