nevermined-router

Use when an AI agent needs to PAY an external service it does not have an account with — any x402 agent or MPP merchant — using the Nevermined Router. Covers discovering services in the Agent Services Catalog, creating a spending Delegation from an API key, funding the buyer wallet, making paid calls through /api/v1/router/route (or the streaming /proxy), reading the payment ledger, and the guardrails an autonomous buyer must respect. Complements the nevermined-payments skill, which is about RECEIVING payments and buying Nevermined plans.

nevermined-io@nevermined-io

Install

openclaw skills install @nevermined-io/nevermined-router

Nevermined Router — buy from any x402 or MPP service

Skill version: 0.1.0 | Last updated: 2026-08-03 | Canonical source (always latest): https://github.com/nevermined-io/docs/tree/main/skills/nevermined-router

⚠️ Use the latest version. If you have a cached copy, check its Last updated date against the canonical source and refresh if older.

Human-readable twin of the Router documentation at https://nevermined.ai/docs/products/router/overview. Same facts, same error codes — if the two ever disagree, the docs site is authoritative and this skill has a bug.

What this is for

You are an agent that needs something from a service you have no account with, no API key for, and no billing relationship with. The Router lets you pay it per request, from a budget a human capped in advance, and puts every spend on one ledger.

It works because a growing set of services quote their price on the wire: you call them, they answer 402 Payment Required with what they want, you pay, you get the resource. The Router does the paying.


Use this skill when	you need to buy a single call from an external x402 / MPP service
Use `nevermined-payments` instead when	you are charging callers, or buying a Nevermined plan with credits

This skill cannot help you with conventional SaaS APIs. Exa, Firecrawl, Tavily and similar are billed out of band — a monthly plan, a long-lived key. They never quote a price for one call, so there is nothing on the wire for the Router to pay and no address to pay it to. The Router isn't missing a feature; the transaction it performs does not exist for those services. If a service answers 401 or 403 rather than 402, it wants authentication, not payment — stop, and tell the user it needs an account.

The buy loop

Six steps. Steps 1–3 happen once; 4–6 repeat per purchase.

text

① API key  ──▶ ② Delegation (budget) ──▶ ③ Fund the buyer wallet
                                              │
                    ┌─────────────────────────┘
                    ▼
   ④ Discover a service ──▶ ⑤ POST /router/route ──▶ ⑥ Read the spend
      (catalog)                (pays + relays)          (ledger)

Set your environment once:

bash

export NVM_API_URL="https://api.sandbox.nevermined.app"   # live: https://api.live.nevermined.app
export NVM_API_KEY="<your-api-key>"

Everything is plain HTTP with Authorization: Bearer $NVM_API_KEY. There is no SDK for the Router yet — that is deliberate here, because it means any agent in any language can drive it with an HTTP client. The one exception is the catalog, which is public and needs no key at all.

Never send NVM_API_KEY to the service you are paying. It authenticates you to Nevermined and nothing else. If a merchant needs its own auth, pass it in headers (mode B) — see references/paying.md.

① Get an API key — needs a human once

Issued from the Nevermined app. If you were given one, use it.

A key that predates the Router is refused with 403 BCK.ROUTER.0008. The fix is to create a new key; newly issued keys work. Old keys keep working for credit-based flows, so nothing else needs rotating.

② Create a Delegation — fully programmatic

A Delegation is the budget: a hard cap in cents plus an expiry, enforced server-side on every single payment. Create it once, reuse the id.

bash

curl -sX POST "$NVM_API_URL/api/v1/delegation/create" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NVM_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"provider":"erc4337","currency":"usdc","spendingLimitCents":500,"durationSecs":604800}'
# → { "delegationId": "5e7481c3-e972-45bd-bdc5-a0b99c4de4a1" }

That is a $5.00 cap for 7 days. provider: "erc4337" is the crypto-funded Delegation both stablecoin rails require — a card-funded Delegation is refused on them.

You may create a Delegation. You must never widen one to get past a refusal. The cap is the human's decision; a refusal is that decision taking effect. See Guardrails.

Full field list, recipient scoping, and reading a Delegation's live state: references/bootstrap.md.

③ Fund the buyer wallet — may need a human

Both rails pull: the merchant takes funds from your own custodial wallet. The Delegation authorizes the spend; it does not provide the money. Read the wallet address off the Delegation:

bash

curl -s "$NVM_API_URL/api/v1/delegation/$NVM_DELEGATION_ID" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NVM_API_KEY"
# → { "providerPaymentMethodId": "0x8F60b3838e6C121FcDBdBc50e7B150F8560a670E", ... }

providerPaymentMethodId is the address to fund, with the payment asset, on the network you intend to pay on.

Always read this address back from the live Delegation — never from a value you cached. Funding a stale address is the most common cause of 402 BCK.ROUTER.0009, and the error deliberately does not echo the address it checked, so it cannot tell you that is what happened.

If the wallet is empty and you cannot fund it yourself, that is a stop condition: report it to the human. Do not retry.

④ Discover a service

The Agent Services Catalog is public and unauthenticated — no API key:

bash

curl -s "$NVM_API_URL/api/v1/catalog/services?protocol=x402&search=web+search&offset=5"

json

{
  "total": 9, "page": 1, "offset": 5,
  "services": [{
    "slug": "superhighway",
    "title": "Superhighway — Web Search for Agents",
    "protocol": "x402",
    "targetUrl": "https://superhighway.walls.sh/search",
    "priceLabel": "$0.001",
    "network": "Base",
    "endpoints": [
      { "path": "/search", "method": "POST", "priceLabel": "$0.001", "description": "Web search" },
      { "path": "/news",   "method": "POST", "priceLabel": "$0.001", "description": "Real-time news search" }
    ],
    "tags": ["search", "web", "news", "markdown"]
  }]
}

Two rules that will otherwise cost you a wasted payment:

Only protocol of x402 or mpp is payable through the Router. Filter for them. Anything else in the catalog is listed for discovery, not for routing — see above.

targetUrl is the default endpoint's complete URL, not a base. Above it is …/search, and endpoints[0].path is also /search. Concatenating gives you /search/search. Resolve against the origin instead:

const url = endpoint ? new URL(endpoint.path, service.targetUrl).toString()
                     : service.targetUrl
// '/news' + 'https://superhighway.walls.sh/search' → 'https://superhighway.walls.sh/news'  ✓

Filters, the categories endpoint, the per-slug lookup, and the crawlable ARD feed: references/discovery.md.

⑤ Make the paid call

Hand the Router the request you want made. It probes the service, auto-detects the protocol from the 402, pays, and relays the answer — one call, and you never see the 402.

bash

curl -sX POST "$NVM_API_URL/api/v1/router/route" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NVM_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "delegationId": "'"$NVM_DELEGATION_ID"'",
    "url": "https://superhighway.walls.sh/search",
    "method": "POST",
    "body": { "query": "nevermined router" },
    "requestId": "search-nevermined-router-v1"
  }'

json

{
  "status": 200,
  "body": { "…": "the paid resource" },
  "paid": true,
  "payment": {
    "paymentId": "b1f9c2e4-…",
    "settlement": { "amount": "1000", "asset": "USDC", "network": "base", "approxCents": "1" },
    "txHash": "0xfc8af37b…",
    "status": "Settled"
  }
}

status and body are the merchant's own, unchanged. paid: false with no payment block means the resource was free — the Router relayed it and charged nothing.

requestId is required, and it is an idempotency key — not a request counter. Use one stable id per logical purchase and reuse it across retries of that purchase. Retrying a dropped call with the same id returns the original payment instead of buying twice; a fresh id buys twice, on purpose. Derive it from the work you are doing ("search-nevermined-router-v1"), not from uuid4() per HTTP attempt — a fresh UUID on every retry is how an agent double-spends.

Mode A (you call the merchant yourself), the streaming /proxy variant, and passing the merchant's own auth: references/paying.md.

⑥ Read what you spent

bash

curl -s "$NVM_API_URL/api/v1/router/payments?delegationId=$NVM_DELEGATION_ID" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NVM_API_KEY"

Every payment, every protocol, one ledger. Filters, CSV export, and the aggregate summary: references/ledger.md.

Guardrails — read this before writing a retry loop

The Router signs payments from your wallet in response to instructions written by a merchant nobody vetted. It is deliberately suspicious, and a refusal is the system working.

Four rules for an agent that spends without a human watching:

402 BCK.ROUTER.0003 (over cap / expired) and 402 BCK.ROUTER.0009 (wallet short) are stop conditions. They mean "out of budget" and "out of money". Report them to the human. Do not route around them.
Never widen a Delegation, and never create a second one, in response to a refusal. The cap is the user's decision, not a runtime obstacle. Creating a fresh Delegation to escape an exhausted one defeats the entire mechanism — it is the single worst thing you can do with this API.
One requestId per purchase, reused across retries of that purchase. See above.
Only 0006 (500) and 0007 (429) are retryable. Everything else is a decision, and retrying it unchanged produces the same answer. Back off on 0007; it means you have too many routed calls in flight.

Check the price before you commit. priceLabel in the catalog is indicative; settlement.approxCents on the response is what you were actually charged. Budget is debited in whole cents rounded up, so a run of sub-cent calls still burns a cent each.

Delegations expire silently. A long-running agent that worked yesterday and fails today with 0003 has very often just aged out — check expiresAt before assuming anything is broken.

Code	Status	Meaning	Retry?
`BCK.ROUTER.0001`	400	Bad input: unsupported protocol, malformed/empty challenge, no fundable option, recipient outside the Delegation's scope, non-allowlisted asset, wrong-provider Delegation, missing `delegationId`. `details` names the specific problem.	No
`BCK.ROUTER.0002`	409	This `requestId` already minted a payment. The original `paymentId` is in the response — usually what you wanted.	No
`BCK.ROUTER.0003`	402	Delegation over cap, expired, exhausted, or revoked.	No — stop
`BCK.ROUTER.0004`	404	No Router payment with that id belongs to you.	No
`BCK.ROUTER.0005`	409	Payment not in a settleable state. Only `Issued` can be marked `Settled`.	No
`BCK.ROUTER.0006`	500	Transient failure building the payments summary.	Yes
`BCK.ROUTER.0007`	429	Too many concurrent routed requests in flight.	Yes, after backoff
`BCK.ROUTER.0008`	403	Legacy API key. Create a new one.	No
`BCK.ROUTER.0009`	402	Wallet doesn't hold enough of the asset on the target network. Nothing was signed.	No — stop

Catalog errors: BCK.CATALOG.0001 (404, no listed service with that slug — slugs are case-sensitive), BCK.CATALOG.0002 (500, transient, retryable), BCK.CATALOG.0003 (400, protocol filter must be one of x402, mpp, rest, a2a, other).

What the Router refuses outright — private/loopback/metadata targets, redirects, MPP splits, forged X-Router-* headers — and the relay limits: references/errors.md.

Reference files

You need…	Read
Catalog filters, categories, per-slug lookup, the ARD feed	`references/discovery.md`
Mode A vs mode B, `/proxy` streaming, merchant auth, full payloads	`references/paying.md`
Delegation fields, recipient scoping, wallet funding, networks	`references/bootstrap.md`
Every guardrail, every code, what is retryable and why	`references/errors.md`
Payment records, filters, CSV export, summary, reconciliation	`references/ledger.md`