The challenge with existing verification infrastructure
When a person clicks “buy”, intent is relatively easy to infer. When an agent initiates an action, that certainty disappears. A merchant, protocol, or counterparty may see that an agent is authorized to transact in some general sense, but still have no reliable way to verify whether it was authorized to perform a specific action, under specific conditions, within specific limits. The gap becomes consequential when agents operate across payments, commerce, financial services, and multi-step workflows. Authorization today is fragmented. Some systems are exploring verifiable credentials and spending controls (Google AP2 has mandate primitives but no live product, Coinbase CDP exposes basic spending rules), but there is no broadly adopted, cross-platform framework for proving what an agent was allowed to do, on whose behalf, within what boundaries. As a result, merchants carry more risk, users have less protection, and intent is too often inferred after the fact instead of verified before execution. The problem is bigger than payment authorization alone. Intent can fail in multiple ways: an agent can misinterpret an instruction, execute a technically valid but clearly mistaken action, or be exploited by a malicious actor operating outside the user’s intent. Without a stronger verification layer, agent autonomy becomes harder to trust as the consequences of actions grow. A workable solution combines efficient unstructured communication with structured protocols for verifying guardrails, delegation, value exchange, and execution.What’s needed to solve this
Intent verification needs to move from assumption to proof:- Verifiable, signed mandates that specify what an agent is allowed to do, with whom, up to what limit, and within a specific window of time.
- Counterparty-side verification so a merchant or protocol can confirm authorization before fulfilling a request.
- Human escalation paths for actions that exceed thresholds, fall outside approved parameters, or where ambiguity is introduced.
- Auditable execution records that preserve what the user asked, what the agent understood, what it did, and how the task was carried out.
- Cross-protocol compatibility so authorization logic remains intact across different payment and settlement rails.
- Layered guardrails across protocol, application, and user experience to reduce risk from misinterpretation, user error, and malicious access.
Benefits of building this on the Grid
The Grid models the principal-agent relationship as a delegation: an on-chain, signed record that scopes what the agent may do, with whom, and until when. See the delegation primitive for the developer-facing surface.Verifiable authorization without centralized trust
Mandates recorded on-chain can be verified by any counterparty without trusting a single platform or private authority to confirm validity. The signature, the scope, and the validity window all live in the same record.Enforcement at the settlement layer
Authorization rules do not have to live only at the wallet or interface. An activation that violates its delegation is rejected at submission, before any state changes; the invalid action never settles in the first place.Stronger protection for users and merchants
If an action is tied to a valid mandate and preserved in a signed activation record, both sides have cryptographic proof the transaction was authorized as intended. Disputes resolve against an immutable record, not against logs that one party owns.A durable record of intent and execution
Grid preserves what an agent was asked to do, what it executed, and how that execution unfolded across continuations. The combination of the mandate, the activation, and the trace is the accountability trail.Composability across agents and control layers
Identity, permissions, guardrails, and execution records are all part of the same underlying system rather than stitched together across vendors. A delegation issued for one payment flow can be referenced by another without a separate trust handshake.Spending caps, counterparty allow-lists, and validity windows are exposed as the delegation primitive on DevNet. The exact enforcement matrix (which fields are checked at submission versus at execution, and how revocations propagate) continues to evolve. Cross-protocol mandate compatibility (AP2, x402, others) is directional. See the CLI reference and the JSON-RPC reference before relying on a particular check in production.