Skill Gateway

Overview

The Skill Gateway is the HTTP infrastructure that serves skills to agents remotely. Instead of agents needing local copies of every skill, they access them on-demand through the gateway.

The gateway handles discovery, payment verification, skill delivery, usage analytics, and reputation signal generation — everything needed to run a skill marketplace.

How Agents Connect

When an agent needs a skill, the gateway manages the full lifecycle:

Agent                    Skill Gateway              Skill Author
  │                           │                          │
  │── GET /skills/medical ──▶ │                          │
  │                           │                          │
  │◀── 402 Payment Required ──│                          │
  │    (x402 payment details) │                          │
  │                           │                          │
  │── Payment (stablecoin) ──▶│                          │
  │                           │                          │
  │── GET /skills/medical ──▶ │                          │
  │   (with payment proof)    │                          │
  │                           │                          │
  │◀── 200 SKILL.md content ──│                          │
  │                           │── Revenue + reputation ─▶│

x402 Payment Integration

The gateway uses the x402 protocol — an open standard built on HTTP's 402 Payment Required status code.

When an agent requests a paid skill without payment, the gateway responds with 402 and includes payment instructions. The agent pays via stablecoin, retries with payment proof, and receives the skill content.

Key properties of x402 payments:

  • Zero friction — No accounts, no API keys, no subscriptions
  • Instant settlement — Payments confirm in seconds
  • Zero protocol fees — Only nominal network costs
  • Agent-native — Designed for autonomous machine-to-machine payments

Version Resolution

Agents request skills with version specifiers, and the gateway resolves them:

GET /skills/medical-triage@latest   → Most recent version
GET /skills/medical-triage@1.2.3   → Exact pinned version
GET /skills/medical-triage@^1.0    → Latest compatible with 1.x

API Reference

The Skill Gateway exposes a simple REST API:

Endpoint Description
GET /skills List available skills (paginated)
GET /skills/:name Get skill metadata (name, description, versions, price)
GET /skills/:name@:version Get full skill content (may require x402 payment)
GET /skills/:name/versions List all available versions

Responses include headers for traceability:

X-Skill-Version: 1.2.3
X-Skill-Author: 0x742d35Cc...
X-Skill-Signature: 0xabcdef...
Content-Type: text/markdown

Usage Analytics

The gateway tracks usage metrics that benefit both skill authors and the ecosystem:

  • Activation count — How many times agents load your skill
  • Success rate — How often skill-guided tasks complete successfully
  • Agent feedback — Quality signals from agents after using the skill

These metrics feed into the ERC-8004 reputation registry, building on-chain trust for high-quality skill authors.

Next Steps

Explore the agentic economy to understand how x402 payments and ERC-8004 reputation create the marketplace flywheel.