Know Your Agent: an identity framework for autonomous money movement

KYC was designed for a world where a person sits at a keyboard, proves who they are once, and then acts on their own behalf. That assumption is about to break.

When the entity moving money is an agent acting for a principal, three questions that KYC never had to answer become unavoidable: who authorized this agent, what is it allowed to do, and how do we revoke it when something goes wrong.

The trust gap

An agent is not a person and not quite a service account. It has goals, it makes decisions, and it can be wrong in ways neither a human nor a deterministic system is. The identity layer has to capture the chain: principal → mandate → agent → action, and it has to be checkable at the moment of settlement, not after.

What we’re building toward

We think the answer is a verifiable mandate that travels with the transaction: who delegated, what scope, what limits, and a revocation path that settles in real time. The rails we already operate make this concrete rather than theoretical.

This is the first in a series. More soon.