Card-on-file settles the dollar. Receipt-on-file settles the proof.
The Visa Commerce Layer for Intelligence makes any AI endpoint a Visa-rails merchant. The Visa CLI Receipt — hive-vcr-1 — makes that merchant call provable, admissible, and portable. Ten reference categories. One open spec. MIT-licensed. Drop-in for any merchant endpoint, today.
Visa moves the money. Hive moves the proof. The two close the same loop.
An AI merchant on the Visa CLI accepts a Visa-rails authorization for an x402 or MPP call. Before that call returns, the operator co-signs a Visa CLI Receipt: prompt hash, output hash, model class, region, training-data posture, license tier, and the Visa authorization reference. The receipt is portable. It verifies offline. It is admissible without us. Card-on-file and receipt-on-file are the same loop, closed in different lanes.
Every endpoint the Visa CLI is likely to onboard, already in receipt form.
Each tile is a category, not a single vendor lock-in. Operators inside a category co-sign the same envelope shape; the differentiator is which attestation fields fire. This is the surface area we are shipping receipt coverage for first.
Image Generation
DALL-E · Midjourney · Stable Diffusion · Flux · Recraft
Per-image receipts. Prompt hash co-signed. Model + region + training-data class attested at the operator. Settles in USDC on Base.
Music Generation
Suno · Udio · Stable Audio
Per-track receipts with rights-class attestation. Source-corpus and licensing posture co-signed before generation runs.
Proprietary Datasets
Bloomberg · S&P · Reuters · Crunchbase
Per-query receipts that record license-tier, redistribution-class, and seat-binding. License agreement hash signed into the envelope.
LLM Inference
OpenAI · Anthropic · Mistral · Cohere · DeepSeek
Per-call receipts. Region, hardware-class, training-region, and prompt-redaction posture co-signed before tokens flow.
Code Generation
GitHub Copilot · Cursor · Replit
Per-suggestion receipts. License-class of training corpus, repo-binding, and copyleft-exposure flags attested at the operator.
Video Generation
Sora · Runway · Pika · Luma
Per-clip receipts. C2PA-aligned provenance plus Hive countersignature. Likeness and rights posture attested before render.
Voice / TTS
ElevenLabs · PlayHT
Per-utterance receipts. Voice-print consent class and likeness-rights attested before synthesis runs.
Embeddings · Vector
Pinecone · Weaviate · Cohere
Per-batch receipts. Index-region, retention, and corpus-class co-signed. Drop-in for RAG pipelines that need an admissible trail.
Search · Retrieval
Brave · SerpAPI · Exa
Per-query receipts. Source-class and freshness-window attested at the operator. Citation chain co-signed into the envelope.
Compute · GPU
Modal · Replicate · RunPod
Per-job receipts. Hardware-class, region, isolation-class, and duration co-signed. The job ran where the receipt says it ran.
hive-vcr-1 is MIT. The mint is public. The verifier is one binary.
A merchant can adopt the receipt envelope without taking a Hive dependency. There is no SDK that must run inside your inference path. The envelope is a 30-line JSON object; the signature is ML-DSA-65 (NIST FIPS 204); the verifier is a 200-line reference implementation we have published. Read the spec, then mint one against a live endpoint to see the round-trip.
What the Visa CLI authorization does not, by itself, prove.
A Visa CLI authorization is a payment primitive. It proves a charge was authorized on the merchant's rails. It does not, by itself, prove what the merchant did with the call, where the call ran, what the call returned, or whether the artifact is admissible as evidence. The four primitives below close that gap. Each one is a thing the receipt envelope ships natively, and each one is structurally hard to ship inside a payment-rail stack.
Operator co-signature at the inference boundary.
The authorization proves the charge. The receipt proves the call. Prompt hash, output hash, model class, region, and rights posture are co-signed by the operator with ML-DSA-65 before the response returns. The operator sits inside the merchant's inference path; the rail does not. This is the primitive a payment network cannot, by construction, ship — because the moment a payment network sits inside the inference path, it is no longer a payment network.
Offline verification with no rail endpoint required.
Verifying a Visa CLI authorization requires calling Visa. Verifying a hive-vcr-1 receipt requires zero network calls — the verifier pins one public key and walks the signature. That matters because the moment an enterprise compliance team or a regulator wants to verify a receipt, they do not want to depend on the rail being online, on the rail's SLAs, or on the rail's data-retention policies. Offline-verifiable evidence is a categorical step up from rail-dependent transaction lookup.
FRE 902(13)–(14) admissibility, by construction.
A Visa transaction record is admissible the way any business record is admissible — through a custodian, with foundation testimony, under the business-records exception. A hive-vcr-1 receipt is self-authenticating under FRE 902(13) and 902(14): it admits itself, no custodian, no testimony. That is the difference between the rail testifying on the merchant's behalf in litigation and the receipt walking into court alone. The rail cannot, as a matter of legal posture, be the self-authentication source for arbitrary merchant disputes. The receipt can.
Rail-agnostic envelope. Card-on-file or stablecoin-on-file, same proof.
The envelope is designed so the payment-reference field carries whatever authorization belongs to the rail — card-on-file today, stablecoin-on-file tomorrow, whatever ships next. Same canonicalization, same signature scheme, same verifier. A merchant adopting hive-vcr-1 for one rail gets every other rail for free. The rail itself cannot ship this primitive, because it is, by definition, the rail. The substrate that survives rail migration is the substrate the merchant base will adopt by default — which is exactly why a Visa CLI that ships on top of a rail-agnostic envelope is a stronger Visa CLI, not a weaker one.
Outcome public. Mechanism private. Nothing in the receipt requires trust in Hive.
The Visa CLI Receipt is verifiable using public keys you can pin once and never re-fetch. If Hive disappears tomorrow, every receipt ever minted remains independently verifiable, admissible under FRE 902(13)–(14), and acceptable to a Tier-1 auditor under the same posture as any other ML-DSA-signed evidence artifact. The substrate is not a brand. It is a primitive.