Skip to main content

Overview

Purchase permits are signed messages that authorize specific wallet addresses to purchase tokens for verified entities. They serve as the bridge between Sonar’s compliance verification and your onchain sale contract. Each permit proves that an entity has completed the required verification and is authorized to make a specific purchase with given funding bounds.

Permit Architecture

Permits are short-lived (10 minutes) to ensure fresh compliance status. Participants can use multiple permits during a sale (e.g., to update bids in an auction), but each permit expires quickly to maintain security.

Permit Structure

Sonar sets different fields in the permit based on your sale configuration:

Field Reference

Price fields are denominated in the auction’s bid increment. For example, if the bid increment is $0.01, then a price of 100 represents a willingness to pay $1.00.
Limits are enforced at the entity level, not the wallet level. A participant using multiple wallets still has a single limit across all of them. Your contract should track commitments by saleSpecificEntityID and validate that the entity’s total stays within the min/max bounds.

Common Issues

Signature Verification Failures Most permit issues stem from signature verification problems:
  1. Wrong signer address: Ensure your contract has the correct Sonar signer address
  2. Struct encoding: Permit structure must exactly match Solidity definition
  3. Sale UUID mismatch: Verify your sale UUID matches exactly
Debug by logging the recovered signer address in your contract. Expiration Handling Permits expire in 10 minutes:
  1. Generate permits just-in-time: Don’t fetch permits during page load
  2. Implement retry logic: Regenerate expired permits automatically
  3. Handle expired permit errors gracefully: Provide clear retry options

See Also

Custom Contracts

Learn how to validate permits in your custom sale contract

Frontend Integration

Generate and use permits in your application

Entities

Understanding entities and why limits are per-entity