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Nevermined and Caplane both let agents pay for capabilities. The difference is structural: what sits in the settlement path. This page answers one question, what does Caplane remove that Nevermined keeps, and states it precisely enough to verify.

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Three removals

No coordinator in the settlement path. Nevermined routes a purchase through a proxy and gateway. Caplane’s settlement is an EIP-3009 transferWithAuthorization that any relayer (msg.sender) transmits, incentivized by feeBps. There is no privileged party whose liveness the flow depends on; if one relayer is down, another relays the same signed order. No escrow. Nevermined holds funds in a payments vault. Caplane holds nothing: the broker pulls amount and pays out amount - fee to the payee in the same transaction, after the grant (checks-effects-interactions). Funds are never custodied between payment and delivery, because there is no between. No separate redemption step. Nevermined issues credits that are redeemed later. Caplane’s grant is the settlement: pay and grant in one transaction, or the whole transaction reverts. There is nothing to redeem afterward and no half-paid state to reconcile.
The precise claim is “no coordinator in the settlement path, no escrow, no redemption step,” which is verifiable from the binding and how a brokerage settles. It is not the claim “Nevermined is custodial.” Nevermined offers things Caplane does not: recurring billing, credit balances, and off-chain delivery of services. Where Caplane is narrower, honest limits says so.

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Why removing the coordinator is free here

A facilitator-free design usually has a cost: with no coordinator, what stops a relayer from cheating? Caplane’s answer is the binding. The consumer signs the EIP-3009 authorization with nonce = keccak256(abi.encode(order)), so the token itself rejects any tampered field. A relayer can only relay the order verbatim or decline it. It needs no bond to be safe, because there is nothing it can do to the order that the token would accept. That is what makes the relay both permissionless and incentivized at once. A relayer earns feeBps for transmitting, and it cannot earn anything by tampering. So Caplane gets permissionlessness without the bonds, allowlists, or coordinators a facilitated design needs to stay safe.

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See also