KnowYourAgent

Every payment network rests on one question: who is this, and can we hold them accountable? For people, KYC answers it with identity verification, sanctions screening, and a paper trail examiners can audit. None of that machinery recognizes an agent. It has no passport, no credit file, and no identity that survives a redeploy.

Our bet is that accountability, not model capability, becomes the bottleneck. The protocols for agent-initiated payments already exist. Institutions lack a way to prove who an agent is, who it acts for, and how it has behaved before it touches money.

KnowYourAgent treats agent identity as a financial primitive. It issues verified agent identities bound to an accountable principal, verifies merchants at sub-100ms latency so trust checks fit inside an authorization window, and keeps immutable reputation records an agent cannot shed by restarting under a new name.

The test: whether institutions gate agent-initiated payments on verified agent identity the way they gate account openings on KYC. If they treat agents as anonymous extensions of a cardholder, the bet fails and we will say so. We are running it with design partners now.