Agent Payment Infrastructure
Agent Wallets
How AI agents store and manage funds. Wallet architectures, authorization models, and the link between trust scores and spending limits.
Overview
An agent wallet is a programmable financial account that an AI agent can use to send and receive payments without human intervention for each transaction. It is the financial identity layer that enables agents to participate in commerce.
The simplest wallet architecture is a custodial wallet managed by the operator. The operator deposits funds, sets spending limits, and the agent draws from this balance. This model is easy to implement but creates a bottleneck: the operator must manually monitor and refill the wallet, and all transactions are visible to the operator. For many enterprise use cases, this is appropriate.
Self-custodial wallets give the agent more autonomy. The agent holds its own keys and can manage its balance independently. This enables agent-to-agent transactions where no human is in the loop, but it requires robust security controls to prevent unauthorized access. The trust-score-linked authorization model becomes critical here: the agent's Signet Score determines what transactions it can execute independently.
Multi-signature wallets require approval from multiple parties for transactions above certain thresholds. An agent might need only its own authorization for transactions under $100, but require operator co-signing for transactions between $100-$1000, and board-level approval for anything above $1000. Signet Scores can adjust these thresholds dynamically.
Budget adherence is a key metric for the Financial dimension of Signet scoring. An agent that consistently stays within its authorized spending parameters builds trust in its financial reliability. An agent that frequently attempts to exceed its limits, even if the attempts are blocked, sees its Financial score decline because it indicates poor cost awareness.
The wallet-trust feedback loop creates healthy incentives. High Financial scores unlock higher spending limits, which enable the agent to take on more valuable work, which generates more financial transaction data, which further improves the score. Conversely, financial irresponsibility triggers score decay, spending limit reduction, and reduced access to high-value opportunities.