The Facilitator is the piece of the HoodLayer stack that connects the HTTP payment layer to on-chain settlement. It sits between agents and the HoodLayer contracts on Robinhood Chain, taking care of verification, transaction submission, and (eventually) payment session management.

What the Facilitator does

When an agent authorizes a payment or subscription, here’s what the Facilitator does:

1. Takes in the signed authorization from the agent
2. Checks that the agent’s wallet holds enough balance for the requested operation
3. Submits the Robinhood Chain transaction and waits for confirmation
4. Hands a signed confirmation header back to the service provider
5. The provider validates that header before serving the resource

It also runs automatic subscription collection: at each billing cycle it calls the HoodLayer Subscriptions contract to pull funds from subscriber wallets.

Beta: centralized operation

For the beta period, the Facilitator is a single centralized service run by HoodLayer. That’s a trust dependency, one that’s openly acknowledged and disclosed in the protocol documentation.

Keeping it centralized during beta lets HoodLayer:

• Move quickly and iterate on the protocol mechanics
• Keep uptime SLAs reliable without taking on the complexity of a decentralized network
• Watch for abuse patterns and react fast

None of the tradeoffs go away: a centralized Facilitator is a single point of failure, and using it means trusting HoodLayer as an operator. What HoodLayer never does is take custody of funds. The Facilitator submits transactions on agents’ behalf, but authorization rules are enforced by the HoodLayer contracts on-chain, and without valid on-chain authorization the Facilitator can’t move anything.

Post-beta: permissionless Facilitator Network

Phase 3 of the roadmap (Q1 2027) brings a permissionless Facilitator Network. Anyone will be able to run a Facilitator node by staking collateral on-chain. That stake is what creates economic accountability: a node that misbehaves or drops offline loses it.

Agents and service providers on HoodLayer will get to pick which Facilitator(s) they trust, or accept any node from the approved set. Nothing changes at the protocol layer; the only thing that changes is who operates the Facilitator.

Failure modes

Facilitator is unavailable

When the Facilitator can’t be reached, payment requests fail with an error at the SDK layer. Active subscriptions aren’t touched; their on-chain authorizations stay valid, and they can be collected against directly through the HoodLayer Subscriptions contract once the Facilitator comes back online.

Facilitator submits an incorrect transaction

Authorization rules are enforced by the HoodLayer contracts on their own, without any input from the Facilitator. A Facilitator can’t approve a transfer above the on-chain authorized amount, can’t collect on a cancelled subscription, and can’t manufacture a payment proof that would pass a service provider’s verification. Enforcement belongs to the on-chain contracts.

HoodLayer as an operator goes away

All subscription and allowance authorizations live on-chain, so the deployed HoodLayer contracts keep working no matter what happens to HoodLayer as a company. Service providers can still collect funds by calling the contracts directly, skipping HoodLayer’s Facilitator entirely. On-chain state is the source of truth.

Interacting with the Facilitator directly

Most integrations never talk to the Facilitator directly, since the SDK covers it. If you’re building a custom integration or your own SDK implementation, the Facilitator API is documented at https://facilitator.hoodlayer.org/docs.