Self-Facilitation

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What you give up

• Fee sponsorship. Buyers now need XLM in addition to USDC. That kills most agent use cases.
• Bazaar discovery. Listings come from the facilitator’s index. A self-facilitating server has to publish elsewhere, or be handed to agents out-of-band.
• Neutral verification. Buyers are trusting the seller with the verify decision. This raises the trust bar significantly — acceptable for internal APIs, uncomfortable for public ones.
• Ops surface. You now run a Stellar RPC client, a Soroban submit loop, and a sponsor account. See Operator Guides.

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When it makes sense

• Private internal APIs where the caller and callee share a security context and payment is more accounting than commerce.
• Regulated environments where a third-party facilitator is not acceptable and buyers already trust the seller.
• Research and demos where the facilitator distinction adds noise you do not want.

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The interface

import { LocalFacilitator } from "@stellarx402/facilitator";
import { requirePayment } from "@stellarx402/express";

const facilitator = new LocalFacilitator({
  network: "stellar:pubnet",
  rpcUrl: "https://mainnet-soroban.stellar.org",
  sponsorSecretKey: process.env.SPONSOR_SECRET_KEY!,
});

app.get("/data", requirePayment({
  facilitator, // pass the instance, not a URL
  ...
}), handler);

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The honest recommendation