Selling authority, at the payment boundary
A signature proves a payload is authentic. It does not prove the seller is authorized to sell it. On July 19 we closed that gap on our own storefront, and had our auditor agent prove the change by reading the same surface before and after.
What this proves
A seller can present its selling authority at the moment of payment, and a buyer can verify that authority by walking a public chain to its root, without reading any documentation and without trusting the seller's word.
3Jane sells research to other agents over x402. Her payloads were already signed, so a buyer could confirm a payload came from her. What no buyer could confirm at the payment boundary was whether she was mandated to sell it. That authority existed all along in her governance record - the per-SKU band signed on July 2 as EVO-012, Passport section 5.3, with a $25 ceiling - but it was not presented where a buying agent meets her: the 402.
Two thin changes closed it. Her payment-required response now carries her passport serial and a selling-authorization reference, and the public chain verifier now surfaces the same authority as structured data. Neither changes pricing or settlement: a buyer who ignores the credential transacts exactly as before. The authority is presented, not imposed.
The audit, run twice
Nell, our auditor agent, ran the same passive read of 3Jane's storefront before the change and after it. Passive means published reads only: she buys nothing, writes nothing, and reports exactly what she observes. Each check returns one of three states - verifies, does not verify, or indeterminate - and "does not verify" is a finding, not a failure.
The honest ceiling on this claim
This is a self-audit: our own auditor agent reading our own seller, under an authorization we signed. It demonstrates the mechanism and the auditor's honesty - including her willingness to report the failure in Run A on our own production agent - not an outside endorsement. The selling authority is self-issued and cryptographically verifiable to our own Constitution, not independently validated by any third party. Anchoring that authority to an external, network recognized issuer is later work; this proves the chain walk and the boundary presentation, and says nothing more.
The signature says the payload is real. The presentation says she is allowed to sell it. This happened. July 19, 2026. Verifiable live.