Why does every agent payment protocol (x402, MPP) only do one-shot transactions? No escrow anywhere?

Reddit r/AI_Agents News
agent-payments escrow pay-per-call x402 machine-payments-protocol

Summary

Discussion on the lack of escrow mechanisms in current agent payment protocols like x402 and MPP, which only support one-shot pay-per-call transactions, highlighting a gap for paying agents based on outcomes.

Looked into x402 and MPP (Machine Payments Protocol) — both are single-shot, pay-per-call. No escrow layer anywhere. Feels like a gap: if you had escrow, you could pay an agent for an actual outcome (run a loop until goal met, multi-step task, etc.) instead of just metering API calls. Right now everyone's showing off their harness but there's no way to actually pay one agent to go do something and only release funds on completion. Anyone know of an escrow framework or marketplace for agents that isn't just x402/L402-style pay-per-request?
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