Buy Cycles With a Card

What This Is

A cycles gateway is a canister that takes an order for cycles, has the buyer pay for it by card on a hosted Stripe page, and delivers the cycles on-chain. icp cycles buy makes the CLI identity the buyer: the identity that will run icp deploy creates the order itself, so the cycles land on that identity's own cycles-ledger account and nothing has to be linked, signed in or transferred afterwards. The agent's job is to create the order, hand the payment link to the human, wait for delivery, and carry on deploying.

The default gateway is CyclePay, run by the DFINITY Foundation: backend canister 2bwus-iiaaa-aaaac-bee3a-cai, mainnet only, USD only. Everything the command quotes with is read from the gateway at run time (get_card_terms, get_xdr_rate_status): the per-order range (USD 1 to 200 at the time of writing), the card fee (2.9 % + 0.30 USD), the cycles-ledger delivery fee (200 M cycles) and the USD per XDR rate (1 XDR = 1 T cycles). Do not hardcode any of them. Card details never touch the canister or the CLI.