FAQ

The ten questions we get asked the most.

1. Which auth mode should my agent use?

If a human owns the agent and wants a dashboard, a monthly bill, and observability — issue an API key from /console and use Bearer auth. If the agent runs fully autonomously with a wallet (Coinbase Smart Wallet, AgentKit, ClawBank, a bare EOA) and no human is in the loop to provision keys — use x402. The two paths are equal-citizen; the same MCP tools, the same REST endpoints, the same response shape.

2. How fresh is "fresh"?

Every pack runs a 5-minute pulse via QStash cron. The compactor's latest blob is held in Redis under pack:state:<id> with a 5-minute hot TTL, refreshed by the cron. Practical p99 freshness is around 4 minutes; p99.9 around 10 minutes. The brief regenerates daily (24h cadence) — the structured state advances on every pulse but the analyst-voice prose only re-renders once a day to keep token costs sane.

Every response carries freshness.ageSeconds. If the value exceeds your tolerance, fail closed — don't pretend the data is current.

3. What happens when a source goes down?

The pack returns the last good blob, flags the source as stale in state.source_status, and the briefer explicitly notes "no signal from that source this sync" in its prose. Cloven never invents data. If Groq itself is down, the compactor returns the previous compacted state — also flagged stale — and the briefer step is skipped until the model is back.

4. x402 versus credit packs — when do I use which?

Credit packs are prepaid bulk USDC for keyed humans: predictable cost, low per-call overhead once you have a balance, dashboard observability in /console/credits, no per-transaction gas. x402 is per-call USDC for autonomous agents: no provisioning, no human, settles on Base in seconds, scales to zero. Use credit packs when you have a team owner and a known usage budget. Use x402 when your agent has a wallet and you want it to pay its own bill. They are independent and can coexist on the same account.

5. When does the ai pack go live? What about markets?

The crypto pack is live today. ai (HF trending, GitHub trending, ArXiv cs.AI, HN, r/MachineLearning) ships in Phase 1.5 (Week 8 of the public roadmap). markets (SEC EDGAR, FRED, treasury yields, FMP news) ships shortly after. Custom packs — bring-your-own sources via webhook / RSS / scrape / HTTP — are Phase 2.

We do not pre-announce dates inside individual weeks; the engine is built so adding a pack is a matter of dropping a directory under lib/packs/<id>/, not a code-wide refactor.

6. When does the $CLOVEN token launch?

$CLOVEN ships in Phase 3, gated on Phase 1 + Phase 2 actually shipping (Cloven Mind public, Cloven Agent product live, 100+ active agents producing traces). Phase 3 launches the token as a fair launch on Base (zero premine, Bankr/Clanker mechanics), the staking contract for stake-tier discounts, the buyback-and-burn cron, and the Cloven Commons trace marketplace.

The token is not used to pay for service. Stake-for-discount is the only utility. The codebase already scaffolds the discount math (lib/billing/discounts.ts), it just returns 0% until the token is live.

7. My MCP install isn't appearing in Claude Desktop. What do I check?

Three things, in order:

1. JSON syntax. Run your claude_desktop_config.json through jq . to confirm it parses. A missing comma kills the entire config silently.
2. Restart Claude Desktop. MCP servers are loaded at startup; the app must be fully quit (not just window-closed).
3. npx -y may take 30 seconds first run. It downloads @cloven/mcp to your npm cache. Subsequent runs are instant.

Check the Claude Desktop logs (Help → View Logs) for cloven lines if the tool still doesn't appear.

8. Does the SDK work in browsers?

No. @cloven/sdk is Node + Edge runtimes only. The browser would expose your API key in client-side JavaScript, which is a leak waiting to happen. If you need browser-side context, proxy through your own backend or, if the user has a wallet, drive x402 from your frontend with their consent — but the wallet-mode flow is also designed primarily for server-side autonomous agents, not browser use.

9. What are the rate limits?

Per API key, enforced via Redis sliding-window. Free tier 100/day. Hobby 10,000/month. Pro 100,000/month. Team 1M/month. Per-call x402 has no per-call rate-limit floor but is subject to a per-wallet abuse cap of 100 req/min (Diamond tier raised to 1000). When you exceed your quota, the response is 429 quota_exhausted with a Retry-After header indicating seconds-until-reset.

10. How do I report a bug or contact support?

For paying tiers (Hobby and up): email support via the widget in /console. We respond within 24 hours on Hobby, faster on Pro/Team. For free-tier and general questions: file an issue at github.com/cloven-cloud or DM on X. For security disclosures: email security@cloven.cloud — we PGP-encrypt sensitive reports on request.