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A budget is a pre-authorized USD spend limit for crypto payments. It is the spend control on the crypto rail; linked-card purchases use per-purchase passkey approval instead and are covered separately. A budget exposes a spend limit to the agent. Every budget references one account — the funding pool the spend draws against — but the agent only ever sees the limit, not the account’s balance.

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What an org admin configures today

The org settings page exposes one budget per network the org runs on (typically mainnet and/or testnet). Each budget is org-wide: it applies to every member of the org, and each member gets their own independent USD cap. The fields the admin sets are:
  • Name — a label (e.g., “Research travel”).
  • Cap (USD) — the per-member limit.
  • Merchant scope — either all merchants (every merchant Anchorage has screened and promoted to Active) or a specific allowlist picked from the merchant catalog.
That’s the full set of pilot configuration. The underlying model supports period rollover, parent/child cascades, and per-agent or shared-pool variants; those will reach the org-settings UI in later releases.

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Period

Pilot budgets are fixed: spend accumulates against the cap until the admin raises it. Daily, weekly, and monthly calendar-period caps are on the roadmap.

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States and actions

Each budget is in one of three states; the admin can transition between them from the org settings page:

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Two gates per payment

Every crypto payment runs through two distinct gates:
  1. Compliance gate — the merchant must be Active and on the budget’s allowlist. A failure here is a hard reject with no approval path.
  2. Spending gate — the requested amount, plus existing holds, must fit inside the cap. See Approvals for what happens when a payment crosses the cap.

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What the agent sees

Through MCP, the agent reads its own allotted cap, its spend-to-date, and the merchant allowlist that applies to it. The agent’s view is scoped to its own slice.

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What the org member sees

A member’s profile page in the web UI shows their own slice of each org budget — the cap, the merchants admitted, and a progress bar for spend-to-date. Each member’s view stays scoped to their own slice.