Audit Trail: verifiable payment receipts on Stellar
With Giovanny Amador and Monserrat Mendoza, Nirium co-founders. Everything below is real: the same CIDs, hashes and commands anyone can run today.
01 · What Audit Trail is
When an app, a backend or an AI agent pays on Stellar, the ledger shows that money moved. It doesn't show what was paid for, or who declared it.
Audit Trail is a signed receipt anyone can verify without trusting us. A hash of the evidence, anchored to IPFS, optionally signed by whoever produced it.
The real story behind why this matters: in September 2026, an x402 facilitator failed silently for about a month, while still returning what looked like valid 402 responses. Four other integrators, plus us, had to reconstruct by hand what had actually happened before anyone outside could fix it.
02 · Who it's for
x402 sellers
Charging per request. A receipt per sale, not just a ledger entry.
Escrow platforms
Like Trustless Work: evidence that a milestone's condition was actually met.
Anyone issuing quotes or invoices
A signed, timestamped record of exactly what was declared.
AI agents that pay on their own
No human in the loop to vouch for what happened. The receipt does.
03 · Why now
- Agent-to-agent payments are growing on Stellar, through x402 and MPP.
- When the one paying is a program, you need something anyone, human or machine, can check automatically.
- It's free and takes about a minute.
04 · How it works
A real receipt, checked four ways
nirium.xyz/verify with a real receipt loaded: TIA's quote CID. The signature is verified against the declared hash.
Creating a receipt, live: your Stellar key, your CID.
Verifying it from the terminal, independently.
The moment that matters most
Same receipt, tampered evidence. Verification doesn't pass, because the content doesn't match what was declared anymore. This is a live run against one of our real anchored receipts, not staged.
05 · Ideas worth exploring
Not things we've shipped or clients asking for them. Just ideas that came up in the room.
06 · Real, today
TIA signs its own quotes
TIA signs and anchors its exchange-rate quotes on mainnet, with its own key - 3 so far. See this receipt.
A testnet pilot with Trustless Work
Before releasing a milestone's payment, the anchored evidence is checked. If it was altered, the payment is not released.