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. leashd 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, plus Cashu ecash. Bind rails with priority and fall back when one is unavailable. leashd is Bitcoin-only by design: no EVM, no stablecoins, no altcoins.
Does it cost anything?
Open-source leashd 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 program that runs on your own machine, right next to your agent. 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.
Why use the hosted control plane if leashd runs locally?
leashd always runs locally and is the only thing that holds keys, in both setups. The hosted control plane saves you from running Postgres, the app, auth, and backups yourself; distributes one signed policy across a fleet of machines and aggregates every audit feed into one view; adds team roles, alerting, long retention, and exportable logs. And because the cloud can never touch your funds (keys never leave your machine), you get managed convenience with zero custody risk. Prefer to run everything yourself? Self-host the control plane from the open-source repo.
Is leashd a money transmitter?
No. leashd is non-custodial software that evaluates policy. It never takes custody: the control plane holds only policy and audit, and leashd moves money solely from your own wallet, under your policy, between you and the counterparty. It is not a bank, exchange, or money transmitter.
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.