Credits and wallet

Every account on the gateway has two separate balances. They are easy to confuse.

Credits (off-chain)

Credits are a USD balance kept in the gateway’s ledger. They are what an assistant spends when it calls a service through Kiba.

• New accounts start with a 5 USD sign-up credit.
• Top up from the dashboard’s Billing page or with POST /v1/topup.
• Spending is immediate and off-chain: a call through the gateway debits credits in milliseconds.
• get_balance and GET /v1/balance report credits as balance_usd.

Wallet (on-chain)

Each account also gets a Stellar wallet, provisioned as a non-custodial server wallet on Privy: the key lives in a secure enclave and the gateway only requests signatures. Its public address is shown in the dashboard and returned by GET /v1/me as custodial_wallet.

• It holds USDC on Stellar. The gateway sets up the USDC trustline for it.
• To fund it, send USDC to its address. There is no memo and no special flow; it is a plain Stellar account.
• Funding the wallet does not add credits. The two balances are independent.

Which one pays a call

When you call a service through the gateway, credits are used first (paidWith: "credit"). The wallet path (paidWith: "wallet") runs the full on-chain escrow from your own USDC and is slower. Most users never need to fund the wallet.

Publishers receive their earnings on-chain, not as credits. See Payments and settlement.