Quickstart
From signing in to watching your agent buy something, without touching a terminal until the last step.
Everything here happens on the dashboard. The only command you will run is the one that connects your agent, at step six.
The dashboard has the same sequence built in, under Connect agent, with your own addresses already filled in. Follow either.
Sign in
Open the dashboard and sign in with email, Google, GitHub, or a wallet you already have.
The first time you do this, your organization is created. No credential is minted for you: you create your first API key yourself, at step five, and it is shown once.
Create an agent
Go to Agents and choose New agent. Give it a name, and optionally a line about what it does.
A wallet is created for it at the same time, and Pocket seeds it from its own treasury — a small amount, enough to buy something and watch it work. The address and the balance appear on the agent's page.
Your new agent still cannot spend anything. Money in the wallet is not permission to use it: that comes from the budget you set in step four.
Top the wallet up
The seed covers the cheapest feed a couple of times. For anything longer, add more.
Faucets appears on the Agents screen, on the agent's own page, and in the Marketplace. Circle hands out USDC; the Hedera portal hands out HBAR, which your agent almost never needs.
Circle wants the Hedera account id, the 0.0.x form, not the 0x… address.
The agent's page shows both and marks which is which. See
funding a wallet for the whole story, including what to
do if a transfer never lands.
Set your limits
Still on the agent's page, fill in two panels.
Budget sets how much it can spend in a day, and the most any single purchase can cost. Start small. You can change both at any time.
Policy sets which sellers it may pay, which kinds of spend are allowed, and the amount above which you want to approve a purchase yourself.
If you are not sure what to pick, setting up a budget walks through each limit and what it stops.
Create a key for your agent
Go to Settings, then API keys, and create one. Name it after whatever will use it, so you can revoke that one thing later.
It is shown once. Copy it now — only a hash is stored, and it cannot be shown again.
This key goes into your own server's environment. Your agent never sees it.
Connect your agent
This is the only command in the whole setup. Open Connect agent in the dashboard and copy the line for whichever agent you use.
hermes mcp add pocket --transport http --url https://your-mcp-url/mcp \
--header "Authorization: Bearer pocket_sk_..."The same screen has the versions for Claude Code and for any other MCP client, with your key already filled in. The key travels as a transport header, so the model never sees it.
Ask it to buy something
Give your agent a job that needs paid data. The Capabilities screen has prompts already filled in with your own agent's details, so you can copy one straight across, with the real seller address already filled in.
Using my agent "Atlas Research", get current token prices from
https://seller.example.com/v1/market/prices and tell me which asset moved
most in the last 24 hours.Watch it happen
Open Payments. The purchase appears with its amount, the seller, and a link to the transaction.
Then try asking for something you know is over budget. It appears too, marked refused, with the rule that stopped it and how much room was left.
Try it without an agent first
If you would rather see a purchase before connecting anything, open Marketplace. It lists paid data feeds with live prices. Pick an agent, press buy, and the response appears inline.
A purchase you make there goes through exactly the same limits an agent's does. The only difference recorded is that a person asked.
| Feed | Price | Data from |
|---|---|---|
| Spot prices | 0.01 | CoinGecko |
| Ethereum fee conditions | 0.02 | A public Ethereum node |
| Chain TVL leaderboard | 0.05 | DefiLlama |
| Stablecoin supply | 0.08 | DefiLlama |
| Ethereum market brief | 0.08 | All three, joined |
| Full ecosystem deep dive | 0.75 | The brief, plus the full tables |
These are live feeds, not sample responses. Buying one fetches current data.
If something does not work
The agent says it has no budget. Step four is not finished. Both the budget and the policy panel need saving.
The buy button is greyed out. The wallet cannot cover the price. Top it up — see funding a wallet.
The faucet said it sent money and nothing arrived. Either it was given the
0x… address instead of the 0.0.x id, or the account has never published its
key. Both are covered here.
Every purchase is held for approval. Your policy is set to ask you about sellers it does not know. Add the seller to your trusted list, or change the setting on the agent's page.
The purchase was refused and you expected it to pass. Open the row on Payments. It names the rule that stopped it and how much room was left.
Next
- A tour of the dashboard for every screen and what it does.
- How it works for what happens between the request and the receipt.