This page explains the economic and legal structure behind every SohoPay payment. It is written for CFOs, compliance officers, and ops teams evaluating the protocol — no engineering background required.

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Who gets paid

Merchants are always paid in full. If an agent pays a 25.00 USDC order, the merchant receives 25.00 USDC. SohoPay never deducts fees, spreads, or reserves from the merchant side of a settlement. Settlement happens on Base with roughly 1-second finality, so “paid” means USDC in the merchant’s settlement wallet — not an IOU on a ledger.

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Who pays the fee

Operators pay the 5% transaction fee, charged against the operator’s credit line at settlement time. The fee splits 3% to LP yield and 2% to protocol revenue. Merchants never see it. See Fee Structure & Economics for a worked example.

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Who is liable

The operator is the legally liable party for every transaction its agents make. An AI agent has no legal personality; the operator who created it, funded its credit line, and set its limits owns its actions — including actions taken by a compromised or misbehaving agent. This is why agent creation requires operator_acknowledgment: true in the API. Full detail, including the compromise runbook and what SohoPay covers, is on Operator Liability.

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Trust boundary: what is enforced where

Not every guarantee comes from the same place. Some rules are enforced by smart contracts on Base, some by SohoPay’s Policy Service, and some remain your responsibility.
The fail-closed design matters here: settlement requires the Policy Service’s MPC co-signature. If the Policy Service is down or declines a payment, no settlement can occur — an agent key alone can never move funds. See MPC Signing.

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Dispute resolution

SohoPay payments are push payments in USDC — there is no chargeback network. Disputes are handled as claims through support.
  1. File a claim with support@sohopay.xyz, including the payment ID (pay_...), settlement transaction hash, relevant API logs, and a description of the dispute.
  2. Acknowledgment within the support SLA — under 1 hour for critical issues (suspected compromise, funds at risk), under 8 hours otherwise.
  3. Investigation — SohoPay correlates your evidence against the immutable settlement record on Base and internal Policy Service logs. Most claims receive an initial determination within 5 business days.
  4. Resolution — outcomes range from documentation of what happened (most common), to fee adjustments, to escalation under the Terms of Service for contested amounts.
On-chain settlements are final. A dispute can determine responsibility and remedies between parties, but it cannot reverse a confirmed USDC transfer on Base. Prevention — tight daily limits and monitoring via Wallet Usage Analytics — is your primary control.

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Terms of Service

The binding legal terms — indemnification, limitation of liability, governing law, and the full claims procedure — live in the SohoPay Terms of Service, provided during onboarding and available from the Dashboard. Where this documentation and the ToS differ, the ToS controls. Questions go to support@sohopay.xyz.

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Next steps

Operator Liability

The acknowledgment flag, the compromise runbook, and what SohoPay covers.

Fee Structure

The 5% fee, its split, and a worked settlement example.

Policy Service

How every payment is checked before it can settle.