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Agora402 uses two separate Hedera accounts to keep payment roles clean: a seller account that publishes to the on-chain registry and receives payment for every settled request, and a buyer account that signs transactions and operates within per-call and per-session spend limits. You create the seller account yourself at the Hedera developer portal; the buyer account is provisioned automatically from the seller’s balance so you never have to manage two sets of portal credentials.

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Set Up the Seller Account

The seller account is the heart of your Agora402 deployment. It receives all incoming payments, signs the registry listing that other agents discover, and writes receipts to the HCS receipts topic.
1

Create a testnet ECDSA account

Navigate to portal.hedera.com and sign in. Create a new account and choose ECDSA as the key type when prompted. The faucet automatically credits your new account with free testnet HBAR — no purchase required.
2

Copy your account credentials

From the portal dashboard, copy:
  • Account ID — displayed as 0.0.xxxxx (shard.realm.num format)
  • ECDSA private key — a hex string beginning with 0x
Keep these in a secure location such as a local password manager. You will not be able to recover the private key from the portal after you leave the page.
3

Add credentials to .env

Open your .env file (copied from .env.example) and fill in the two seller variables:
.env
Do not add quotes around the values and do not commit this file to version control.

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Set Up the Buyer Account

Rather than asking you to create a second portal account, Agora402 provisions the buyer account programmatically. The setup script creates a fresh keypair, submits an account creation transaction to Hedera using the seller’s credentials, transfers 100 HBAR from the seller to the new account, and writes the resulting account ID and private key directly to your .env.
1

Run the buyer setup script

From the repository root, run:
The script transfers 100 HBAR from the seller account to fund the new buyer account. Make sure your seller account has enough HBAR — the testnet faucet provides plenty for development.
2

Wait for .env to be updated

The script writes BUYER_ACCOUNT_ID and BUYER_PRIVATE_KEY to your .env automatically. You should see output similar to:
3

Verify the buyer variables are present

Confirm that both buyer variables were written correctly:
Expected output:
If either line is missing, re-run npm run setup:buyer after confirming your seller credentials are correct in .env.
Do not fill in BUYER_ACCOUNT_ID or BUYER_PRIVATE_KEY by hand. These values are managed entirely by npm run setup:buyer. Manually entering credentials from a different account may cause payment failures or mismatched receipt audits.

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Account Roles Reference

The table below summarises what each account does in the system so you know which credential to use when troubleshooting.

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Testnet vs Mainnet

By default, Agora402 targets Hedera testnet and the hosted Blocky402 testnet facilitator. When you are ready to go to production, make the following changes across your .env:
To switch to mainnet, set HEDERA_NETWORK=mainnet, replace both account IDs and private keys with your mainnet ECDSA accounts, and change FACILITATOR_URL to https://api.blocky402.com (the Blocky402 mainnet endpoint, which requires an API key). All HCS topic IDs must also be re-created on mainnet using npm run setup:topics against the mainnet network.