Feed account is permissionless and free. A subscription, or an x402 payment per round, is only needed to request new signed rounds from a gateway.
Who runs the nodes?
Independent node operators admitted by the protocol authority. Each posts a USDC deposit on Solana and can be slashed with on-chain evidence of misbehaviour, which anyone can file.
Who runs the gateways?
Molpha. A gateway admits requests, takes payment and dispatches rounds, but it cannot forge an attestation: verifiers check the nodes’ signature, not the gateway.
Do AI agents need subscriptions?
Not always. Agents have two options: a Delegate under an existing subscription, or x402 pay-per-request with no monthly plan.
What is x402 used for?
x402 is the HTTP payment loop for pay-per-request rounds. The first request returns a 402 Payment Required envelope with where and how much to pay; the client signs an x402 v2 exact USDC payment to the protocol treasury and retries. Each verified payment authorizes exactly one round, and there is no escrow account or request signature beyond the payment.
Do I need to change my contract to consume Molpha on EVM?
One external call: (bool ok, uint8 code) = verifier.verify(attestation, maxAge); require(ok);. maxAge is your staleness window in seconds (0 disables the check). No inheritance, no interface to implement. See EVM.
Why does the same signature work on every chain?
The signed message contains no chainId, and every verifier (Solidity, Cairo, the Solana program) checks the identical domain-separated message with the identical selection and aggregation rules. Parity tests check that unmodified EVM-produced signatures verify on Starknet.
Who keeps a Solana feed updated?
submit_attestation is permissionless — a gateway, a keeper or your own backend can push signed values. The program re-verifies the aggregate signature on every write, so the submitter doesn’t affect trust in the value. Each submitter writes its own Feed account for a source and quorum (the submitter is part of the account address), so a reader must know which submitter’s feed it consumes.
Does the verifier protect me from stale or replayed data?
Partly. The Solana program’s submit_attestation enforces a freshness window and only accepts a strictly newer timestamp per feed. The EVM and Starknet verify(attestation, maxAge) reject an attestation older than maxAge seconds when you pass a non-zero value, and a registry version is accepted only until shortly after its successor activates. No verifier tracks consumed attestations: add replay protection in your own contract where it matters. See Solana, EVM and Starknet.
Is Molpha Chainlink (AggregatorV3) compatible?
No, by design. Consumers call verify() directly with a self-contained attestation. There is no aggregator product.
Is the protocol audited?
Not yet. Current deployments are pre-audit testnet contracts; mainnet follows an external audit. See Releases.