two-phase commit for agent payments — why atomicity matters

agents fail mid-workflow all the time. the payment starts, the agent crashes, the money's in limbo.

i built FiscalGate into mnemopay so agent transactions are atomic. two-phase commit (2PC) isn't new — but applying it to autonomous payments is.

the problem with agent payments

agents don't have retry logic like humans. if a payment half-completes, the agent won't notice. the workflow moves on, the ledger's inconsistent, and you're debugging at 2am.

2PC fixes this:

1. prepare phase — the agent signals intent to pay, mnemopay locks resources
2. commit phase — if all checks pass, the transaction finalizes. if anything fails, the whole thing rolls back

no partial states. no orphaned funds.

how FiscalGate works

mnemopay wraps every agent payment in a 2PC protocol. the agent calls the SDK, we handle prepare/commit behind the scenes. if the agent dies mid-transaction, the timeout triggers a rollback.

i've tested this across 672 scenarios in v0.5.0 — network failures, agent crashes, timeout edge cases. atomicity holds.

why this matters

autonomous workflows can't tolerate half-finished payments. if you're building agent-to-agent commerce, 2PC isn't optional. mnemopay ships it as a governance layer for MCP servers.

agents handle money now — FiscalGate makes sure they do it atomically.