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What are macaroons (and biscuits)?

Macaroons — and their public-key successor, biscuits — are tokens the holder can narrow by adding caveats, without ever contacting the issuer.

The key idea: contextual attenuation

Google's macaroons introduced a token whose bearer can append caveats (restrictions), each chained by an HMAC so it can only add constraints. Biscuits brought this to public-key crypto and a richer policy language. The property that matters for agents: you can hand someone a strictly-less-powerful version of your token, offline.

What Liceat took, and added

Liceat's CW1 warrant is in this lineage — public-key, offline-verifiable, attenuable — with additions agents need: stateful spend and rate caveats enforced against real history, proof-of-possession holder-binding, cascading revocation, and a built-in transparency log.

Give your agents permission, not your keys.

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