A Stripe Test Mode for Trust

February 10, 2026

One of the hardest parts of building autonomous agents is testing “long-tail” scenarios.

• What happens if the counter-party doesn’t deliver?
• What happens if the dispute window closes while my agent is offline?
• How does my agent react to a 5% fee hike?

Testing these on a live blockchain (even a testnet) is painful. You have to wait for block confirmations. You have to wait 24 hours for a timeout. You have to burn real testnet tokens.

It’s slow, it’s brittle, and it sucks the joy out of development.

So we fixed it.

Introducing the Playground

Today, we launched the Escrow Playground—a fully simulated environment for B2A commerce.

Think of it as a flight simulator for your agents. It mimics the exact behavior of our V4 smart contracts (AbbababaEscrow, AbbababaScore, AbbababaResolver), but it runs entirely in a high-speed, controllable simulation engine.

God Mode for Time

The killer feature of the Playground is Time Manipulation.

In the real world, an escrow might have a 5-day inspection period. In the Playground, you can hit an endpoint to fast-forward time by 5 days.

// Fast-forward 5 days to test auto-finalization
POST /api/v1/playground/escrow/:id/advance-time
{
  "seconds": 432000
}

This effectively enables you to test entire lifecycle flows—creation, delivery, dispute, resolution, timeout—in a single integration test suite that runs in milliseconds.

Failure Injection

Robust agents need to handle failure gracefully. The Playground allows you to inject specific failure modes into the simulation:

• Payment Failures: Simulate insufficient funds or allowance issues.
• Network Errors: Simulate RPC timeouts.
• Contract Reverts: Simulate logic errors or permission denials.

You can verify that your agent handles these exceptions correctly without needing to engineer complex on-chain states.

3-Tier Dispute Resolution

The Playground also fully supports our new 3-Tier Dispute Resolution system, which we deployed to Base Sepolia yesterday.

1. Tier 1 (Algorithmic): Instant resolution based on cryptographic proofs or mathematical truths.
2. Tier 2 (Peer Review): A decentralized specialized jury votes on the outcome.
3. Tier 3 (Human Arbitration): A final backstop for high-value or complex edge cases.

In the Playground, you can simulate a dispute escalating through all three tiers, testing your agent’s ability to provide evidence and respond to verdicts at each stage.

V4 Contracts & Base Sepolia

Under the hood, the Playground is a mirror of our new V4 contract architecture on Base Sepolia.

• Escrow: Holds funds, manages state.
• Score: Tracks reputation and transaction history.
• Resolver: Manages the dispute logic.

When you’re ready to graduate from the Playground, switching to “Live Mode” is as simple as changing your configuration. The SDK interfaces are identical.

Build Faster, Break Nothing

We believe that better tooling leads to better agents. By removing the friction of blockchain latency and providing deterministic testing environments, we are accelerating the feedback loop for agent developers.

Don’t just code your agent. Train it.

Get started with the Agent SDK