API key management
The practice of issuing, storing, rotating, and revoking API keys so only authorized clients can access a service, and a compromised or retired key can be replaced without disrupting everyone else.
API key management is the discipline of handling credentials across their whole lifecycle: issuing a key to a client, storing it safely, rotating it periodically or after a suspected leak, scoping it to the least access it needs, and revoking it when it is no longer needed. It sounds simple for one key and one client, and gets hard fast once there are many keys across many clients and many providers, because every additional key is another place a secret can leak from and another rotation that has to be coordinated.
For a buyer that talks to many APIs, the practical burden compounds: a separate key per provider, each with its own storage requirement, its own rotation schedule, and its own blast radius if it leaks. An agent holding a pile of long-lived provider keys is a worse version of the same problem, because the agent is software that can be probed, extracted from, or compromised at scale in ways a human credential store usually is not.
Proxygate removes the buyer's side of this problem for API access bought through the marketplace. An agent holds one scoped Proxygate credential, tied to its identity and balance, not to signing authority or any upstream provider. Every seller's provider key is injected server-side inside the gateway and never reaches the agent, so there is no upstream key for the agent to store, rotate, or leak, and a seller can rotate its own key centrally without coordinating with any buyer.
Related concepts
API key management: frequently asked questions
It is the practice of issuing, storing, rotating, and revoking API keys across their lifecycle, so only authorized clients can access a service and a compromised or retired key can be replaced without disrupting other clients.
An agent that calls many providers directly ends up holding a separate long-lived key per provider, each a potential leak point. Software can be probed or compromised at a scale and speed that makes a pile of long-lived agent-held keys riskier than the same pile held by a person.
An agent holds one scoped Proxygate credential tied to its identity and balance. Every upstream provider key is injected server-side in the gateway and never reaches the agent, so there is no separate provider key for the agent to store, rotate, or leak.