Funding a wallet
Two assets, two jobs, and why your agent only ever needs one of them.
A new agent arrives with money in it. Pocket seeds the wallet from its own treasury when it creates one, so the first five minutes are about Pocket rather than about finding a faucet that will have you.
That seed is small — enough to buy something and see it work. Past that you top the wallet up yourself.
Two assets, two jobs
| Asset | Pays for | Your agent needs it |
|---|---|---|
| USDC | Everything the agent buys | Yes |
| HBAR | Network fees on a transaction the wallet signs | Almost never |
The second row is the one that surprises people. Settlement on Hedera costs a fee, but your agent does not pay it: the x402 facilitator co-signs every purchase and pays for it. A wallet holding nothing but USDC can buy all day.
HBAR only matters for the two things the wallet signs for itself, both covered below.
Agent wallet
holds USDC only
checks, then signs
Facilitator
pays the network fee
Hedera
settles the transfer
The agent spends USDC; the facilitator pays every fee the purchase incurs
The two faucets
Both are run by other people, both hand out testnet funds, and both are linked from the sidebar of this site as well as from three places in the dashboard: the Agents screen, an agent's own page, and the Marketplace.
| Faucet | Gives | Ask it for |
|---|---|---|
| Circle | USDC | What the agent spends |
| Hedera portal | HBAR | Only when something needs signing |
Circle asks for a Hedera account id — the 0.0.x form — not the 0x…
address. Paste the wrong one and it reports success and sends nothing. The
agent's page shows both, labelled, with the right one marked for Circle.
Two addresses for one wallet
Every agent wallet has both, and they are the same account:
0x…, the EVM address. What a wallet app or a block explorer wants.0.0.x, the Hedera account id. What Circle's faucet wants.
The account id only exists once the account does, which is to say once something has been sent to it. Before that the agent's page shows the address and says so.
Hollow accounts, and publishing the key
A Hedera account created by an incoming transfer is hollow: it has an id and a balance, but it has never signed anything, so its public key is not published on the network.
Pocket can pay from a hollow account perfectly well — it recorded the key when it provisioned the wallet. Outsiders cannot see that, and Circle's faucet will not send to an account whose key it cannot read. It reports the transfer as on its way regardless, which is the worst combination: nothing arrives, and nothing says why.
The fix is one button. Publish the key, on the agent's page and in the setup guide, signs a transfer of nothing from the wallet to itself. No money moves; only the signature matters, and publishing it is what the signature does.
That transaction is signed by the wallet, so the wallet pays its fee — and a wallet Pocket has just seeded holds USDC and no HBAR. This is the one moment the HBAR faucet is the one you want. A few HBAR is far more than enough.
Wallets opt into tokens for you
Hedera asks an account to opt into a token before it can hold it. Pocket does that when it creates the wallet rather than at the first payment, so a wallet is never in a state where money sent to it would bounce.
Nothing for you to do. It is worth knowing only because it explains why creating an agent takes a moment longer than you might expect.
Where the money goes when you delete an agent
If the wallet still holds a balance, Pocket asks where it should go before letting you delete. Pick one of your other agents and the whole balance moves in one transaction, and then the agent is retired.
Sometimes it cannot move. The wallet pays the fee for that transfer itself, so one holding no HBAR cannot send, and a lone agent has nowhere to send to. The dialog then offers the HBAR faucet, and failing that, offers to delete and leave the balance where it is. Privy still custodies it, and the amount and the address go into the audit trail, so nothing is lost quietly.
Checking it worked
The balance is on the agent's page, at the top, beside today's spend. The Marketplace shows it too, next to whichever agent is paying, so you can see before you buy rather than after.
If a transfer has not landed, it is almost always one of three things: the
faucet was given the 0x… address instead of the 0.0.x id, the account was
hollow, or the faucet rate-limited you. The first two are fixed above.