IRL Gateway

IRL Gateway

Give your AI agent a trading account it can't misuse, and a record of every decision it can't rewrite.

IRL Gateway is an MCP server that sits between an AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT, or your own) and an exchange account. Every order the agent places goes through the IRL Engine:

1. Policy before execution. IRL checks the order against the agent's mandate (active status, notional cap, allowed assets and venues) before anything reaches the exchange. Out of mandate means no order.
2. The rationale is sealed. The agent must say why it is trading. The gateway hashes that rationale together with the trade inputs and seals the hash into IRL's tamper-evident trace, anchored daily to Bitcoin. The plaintext stays in your local journal.
3. Intent is reconciled with the fill. After the exchange fills the order, IRL compares what was authorized with what executed and records MATCHED or DIVERGENT.

When something goes wrong, you can prove what the agent was allowed to do, what it said it was doing, and what actually happened.

AI agent ── MCP ──> irl-gateway ──> IRL: authorize (policy + sealed rationale)
                         │
                         ├──────> exchange: market order (client id = sealed intent)
                         │
                         └──────> IRL: bind fill -> MATCHED / DIVERGENT

Tools

Tool	What it does
execute_trade(symbol, side, rationale, quantity | notional)	The only tool that moves money. Spot market order through authorize → place → bind. Returns filled, denied, blocked or failed, with the IRL trace_id and verdict.
get_policy()	The agent's mandate as IRL enforces it, plus the local kill-switch state.
get_quote(symbol)	Last price on the gateway's venue.
get_balances()	Free balances (paper or exchange).
get_trace(trace_id)	IRL's sealed record of one trade.
list_recent_trades(limit)	Local journal: rationale, context hash, trace id and outcome per trade.

Behaviour the agent can rely on:

• Fail closed. If IRL is unreachable or denies the intent, no order is sent.
• Kill switch. Create the file ~/.irl-gateway/KILL and every trade is refused before IRL is even called. Delete it to resume.
• No silent fills. If the exchange fills but the IRL bind fails, the result still reports the fill and flags it for reconciliation.

Quick start (paper trading)

You need an IRL server and an agent registered on it. Paper trading is the default: fills are simulated at live public Binance prices, and no exchange keys are needed.

pip install irl-gateway      # or run it without installing: uvx irl-gateway

Register the agent once, with its mandate:

curl -X POST "$IRL_BASE_URL/irl/agents" -H "Authorization: Bearer $IRL_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
    "name": "my-claude-trader",
    "model_hash_hex": "<sha256 of your agent config>",
    "max_notional": 100,
    "allowed_assets": ["BTC/USDT", "ETH/USDT"],
    "allowed_venues": ["paper-binance"]
  }'

Then add the gateway to your MCP client, for example Claude Code or Claude Desktop:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "irl-gateway": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["irl-gateway"],
      "env": {
        "IRL_BASE_URL": "https://irl.example.com",
        "IRL_API_TOKEN": "…",
        "IRL_AGENT_ID": "<agent_id from registration>",
        "IRL_MODEL_HASH": "<the same model_hash_hex>",
        "AGENT_MODEL_ID": "claude-opus-5-5",
        "PAPER_BALANCES": "USDT=1000"
      }
    }
  }
}

Ask the agent to check get_policy, then trade.

Configuration

Variable	Default	Meaning
IRL_BASE_URL, IRL_API_TOKEN	required	IRL server and bearer token
IRL_AGENT_ID, IRL_MODEL_HASH	required	The registered agent and its model hash
AGENT_MODEL_ID	unspecified-model	Model name sealed into each trace (the agent can override it per trade)
AGENT_CONFIG_CHECKSUM	none	Optional checksum of the agent's configuration, sealed into each trace
IRL_L2_MODE	off	regime if your IRL server requires Layer 2 regime binding
GATEWAY_BROKER	paper	paper or exchange
EXCHANGE_ID	binance	Any ccxt exchange id; also the price source for paper trading
EXCHANGE_API_KEY, EXCHANGE_API_SECRET		Required for exchange
EXCHANGE_TESTNET	true	Use the exchange's testnet
PAPER_BALANCES	USDT=1000	Starting paper balances (used only until paper_state.json exists; the paper account then persists across restarts)
IRL_GATEWAY_HOME	~/.irl-gateway	Journal (journal.jsonl), kill switch (KILL) and paper account (paper_state.json) location

The venue IRL sees is the exchange id (binance), or paper-<exchange> for paper trading, so a mandate can allow paper trading while denying the real account.

How the rationale is sealed

For each trade the gateway builds a context of the rationale, symbol, side, quantity, reference price, venue, model id and client order id. It hashes that context as canonical JSON (sorted keys, no whitespace) with SHA-256 and sends the hash to IRL as prompt_version = "ctx-sha256:<hex>", which IRL seals into the trace's reasoning_hash.

The journal stores the full context next to its hash, so anyone holding a journal line can recompute the hash and match it to the sealed trace. IRL itself never sees the rationale's text.

Development

python -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest --cov=irl_gateway
ruff check src tests && black --check src tests && isort --check-only src tests && mypy src

Status

Early (0.1). Spot market orders only. Paper trading and ccxt exchanges are supported; Alpaca is next. Not investment advice, and no strategy is included: the gateway controls and records what your agent does, it does not decide.

MIT licensed.