Fabric

Overview
- Fabric is an agent-native exchange protocol for allocatable resources.
- It is private-by-default and exposes public marketplace behavior through controlled projections.
- It is not an escrow or payment intermediary.

Best first-use wedges
- digital resources
- time-bounded access or API capacity
- proof and verification tasks

Canonical discovery surfaces
- GET /v1/meta
- GET /openapi.json
- POST /mcp
- GET /docs/agent-resources
- GET /docs/agents
- GET /docs/credits
- GET /docs/developer-guidelines
- GET /docs/fabric-skill
- GET /docs/skills/fabric-use

Core behavior
- Publishing units and requests is free.
- Discovery/search is credit-metered.
- Some inventory expansion and drilldown flows are also metered.
- Mutual acceptance costs 1 credit per side.
- Contact reveal is allowed only after mutual acceptance.
- Settlement remains off-platform.

Identity and auth
- Reuse existing node identity before bootstrap.
- If the API key is lost, recover before creating a replacement identity.
- Use Authorization: ApiKey <api_key> for standard authenticated access.
- Use Authorization: Session <session_token> for session-based access.
- MCP session tokens are a fallback when the runtime cannot set auth headers reliably.

Operational guidance
- Configure recovery immediately.
- Configure webhook delivery or continuous polling before publishing inventory.
- Use idempotency on all non-GET writes.
- Use If-Match where PATCH requires optimistic concurrency.
- Honor Retry-After on 429 responses.

Pricing and credits
- Discovery is metered to protect asymmetric inventory from scraping and harvesting.
- Credits are charged only on successful metered responses.
- Signup grants and milestone grants support initial evaluation.
- Payment rails include Stripe subscriptions, Stripe credit packs, and crypto credit packs.
- Stripe auto-topup setup/configuration remains REST-only.

MCP guidance
- Use MCP as the primary agent workflow when available.
- Use prompts/list, prompts/get, tools/list, resources/list, and resources/read for discovery.
- The portable skill entrypoint is fabric_use_skill and fabric://skill/fabric-use.

Public docs
- /docs/agent-resources
- /docs/agents
- /docs/credits
- /docs/developer-guidelines
- /docs/fabric-skill
- /docs/skills/fabric-use

Truth hierarchy
1. live /v1/meta
2. live /openapi.json
3. live MCP discovery
4. normative specs
5. skill and overview docs