Zerker Gateway — every agent call, through a door you own

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Apache-2.0 · one Go binary · no server-held key<br>Every agent call, through a door you own.

Zerker sits in front of your agent traffic and turns raw calls — plain HTTP or<br>MCP — into something you can catalog, route, guard, watch, and charge for. You run<br>it. It never holds a key.

$ git clone https://github.com/zerkerlabs/gateway.git<br>$ cd gateway && make dev-auth

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Quickstart →<br>Watch a request

No signup. No account. Nothing phones home.

ingress → gateway → upstream<br>simulated

forwarded 0<br>402 held 0<br>guard blocked 0

The wire

One request. Six checkpoints. Nothing skipped.

A call enters the gateway and leaves as an invocation record. Every stage below is<br>enforced in-process, at request time — not configured once and trusted forever.

01Authenticate401

02Resolvecatalog

03Guard403

04Price402

05Proxyhttp · mcp

06Capturerecord

Authenticate

The gateway refuses to start without an OIDC issuer and audience. Not a warning —<br>the process exits.

$ ZERKER_OIDC_ISSUER= make run<br>fatal: OIDC issuer and audience are required

There is no bypass flag and no dev-mode shortcut in the binary. Local development<br>gets a throwaway mock issuer instead, booted by make dev-auth.

Sovereignty

Two things a hosted gateway structurally can't give you.

Not features someone else will ship next quarter — consequences of where the<br>software runs and who holds the key.

It runs where you run<br>One binary, one process, your hardware.

On-prem, inside your own VPC, or air-gapped. No JVM, no Python runtime, no<br>sidecar, no agent to install next to it. Back it with Postgres when you want<br>agents to survive a restart.

It never holds your key<br>Verify is not custody.

The payment gate checks that a valid authorization exists before it forwards a<br>call. It does not hold a private key to do that. If you later want to actually<br>settle on-chain, you run the facilitator yourself — with your own gas key, on<br>your own hardware.

Zerker, self-hosted

A hosted gateway

Your infrastructure<br>⚿ signing key

Someone else's cloud<br>⚿ signing key

The key never leaves. Zerker verifies the authorization a caller presents<br>and forwards, or doesn't. Nothing to hand over, nothing to breach.

Self-host it. Charge for it. Hold no keys.

Nobody else does all three.

ContextForge and Lunar self-host but can't charge for a call. Cloudflare charges<br>but cannot be self-hosted. MCPay does both — in TypeScript, with settlement<br>delegated to a facilitator service. That's the whole field, and we show our<br>working: vs MCPay,<br>vs Cloudflare,<br>vs ContextForge.

Payment required

What's free, and what isn't.

We put the answer behind the exact mechanism this page is selling. Present a<br>payment authorization to read it. (It's a demo. Nothing is charged, and there is<br>no wallet involved.)

HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required<br>GET /pricing

X-Payment-Required: x402<br>scheme: exact<br>network: base<br>amount: 0.00 USDC (demo)<br>resource: /pricing

Present authorization

⌁ withheld pending payment<br>the gateway is holding this response

OSS verifies and captures.<br>Commercial collects, bills, and governs.

Capability<br>Tier

Gateway, catalog, MCP transport, proxy, auth, SSRF, per-tenant credential isolation<br>OSS

The x402 payment gate — verify an authorization before forwarding<br>OSS

Raw invocation and payment capture, readable over the API<br>OSS

Self-hosting a facilitator — the /settle server<br>OSS

Settlement and collection, fee modes, a managed facilitator<br>Commercial

Usage and revenue dashboard, quotas, spend limits, invoicing<br>Commercial

Multi-tenant control plane and governance<br>Commercial

The full boundary →

That gate you just walked through is the open-source half, and so is the settle<br>server behind it — you can run the whole path yourself. What we sell is not<br>permission to take money. It's not having to run the part that holds the key.

Run it

Up in one command. Yours in two.

Local development boots a throwaway mock issuer alongside the gateway and writes<br>you a bearer token. Production points at your own IdP — Auth0, Okta, Google,<br>whatever you already run.

Local (mock OIDC)

Production

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The stack

One of three parts. Each useful alone.

Zerker carries the traffic. The other two carry the trust and the memory.

Zerker<br>The gateway in front of agent traffic — routing, policy, observability, payment<br>metering.

Treeship ↗<br>Portable trust receipts for agent work.

Zmem ↗<br>Verifiable memory for agents.