Agent Spending Without Controls — Rodrigo Coelho & Pranav Maheshwari, Edge & Node

The Graph, and paying for queries before x402 existed

00:12All right, thanks for having me. Uh, today we're going to be speaking about ampersend and agent spending without controls, which is the missing infrastructure layer for AI payments. A little bit about myself, uh, I'm CEO of Edge and Node. For those that aren't aware, we were the team that built the graph protocol.

00:28For those that aren't aware of that, um it is a blockchain data indexing protocol. It's been around since 2018. We have a decentralized network. Um we've served 1.8 trillion queries over the years of onchain data to applications um utilizing blockchain data.

00:45Um I've been a serial entrepreneur myself and we've incubated a project within engine node called ampersend uh in the ejected commerce space which is what we're going to be talking about today. And so we're all aware that payments have been online for the past 30 years.

01:09Um you know starting in 1981 we had our first electronic transaction and fast forward we had a multi-deade transition. Um, and this is from credit card payments to online e-commerce payments. Uh, fast forwarding all the way to today where we have the rise of the agent economy and unlocking a new wave of economic value.

01:32And now we have LLMs and agents uh that can transact and we have this underlying payment infrastructure that's been around for decades and it's being rebuilt today um for the agentic economy. we've heard from many speakers here about how that's being done.

01:49We're going to be discussing today um our perspective and angle on it. So we we ourselves at edge and node were really early into the agentic commerce world. We actually developed um a microp payment system for queries back

Prior art: micropayments, the 402 spec, and joining the foundation

02:05in 2021. We already referenced the 402 spec back back then in a blog post. And so back in late 2024, we were looking into agents and how they would interact with data, how they would pay for it, specifically for the graph protocol itself and making microp payments for queries.

02:22And in our research, we were kind of looking at how this this could happen. And then a few weeks later, X42 was released by Coinbase. So we jumped on immediately with the Coinbase team, with the Google team, started to collaborate to the X42 spec.

02:30We've joined the foundation. We've contributed to the X42 uh spec ourselves leveraging some of our prior art on the um microp payment system and uh batching protocol as part of how it could be utilized to uh reduce gas fees when you're dealing in nano payments.

02:55Um Circle themselves came out with their own kind of version of it called nano payments. Um so we were also working in similar veins and so we've seen an explosion of uh companies emerge solutions technologies and this kind of agented commerce map you can see on the screen here that there's a vast array of companies more added every day.

03:16It's really burgeoning. Um, and you know, we're just one little piece in here of people developing, you know, infrastructure, um, payment protocols, governance, etc. And so, traditional payment rails though were built for humans. Um, you know, when we're dealing with like financial institutions specifically, there's kind of a human in the loop that sets uh the decision making process of uh whether that payment is allowed to go through.

03:48But we're dealing with agents that transact at machine speed and around the clock. And like I was saying is all these controls and uh policies and rules

Rails built for humans in the loop, not machines

03:57were built for humans and not for uh uh machines that don't breathe, right? So we're dealing in um in microscond machine speed and it's just simply not going to work in the way it has. And so we need a new method of doing that. Um you can see a lot of the transactions uh exploding.

04:11This is sort of over time. We're seeing um transaction growth over X42. We're all saying this is coming. It is still early days. We're uh ourselves we're seeing a lot of experimentation kind of with uh with OpenClaw people making retail payments on an experimental basis.

04:27still not on the enterprise side as we're talking to uh many teams. Definitely everyone's looking at it and building kind of the infrastructure for when um these use cases break through. And so that's part of what we're we'll be displaying today with Amperson.

Why enterprises stall without a compliance layer

04:53But in order for this to really break through, we need a compliance layer specifically when you're dealing with like you know uh almost a quadrillion dollar industry of the the traditional financial world. there's a set of rules, policies, and guidelines that need to be in place before anything can happen.

05:00Uh beyond just a credit card transaction, we're dealing with trillions and trillions of dollars um being transacted um across the globe. And so we're going to be honing in a bit on that as part of the presentation today in the demo that's coming up.

05:16But the compliance layer is literally like is is this counterparty um a non-sanction entity? is this counterparty uh have they been involved in terrorist activity? Who is the identity behind this? And when you're dealing with a Gentic systems, it's just simply you're presented with just a wallet address with no kind of background information on that.

05:40And we need these uh infrastructure layers in

A wallet address with no identity behind it

05:50place to um to enable and facilitate enterprises to feel comfortable to adopt this um technology. All of these systems exist in the existing world today. But uh as we're breaking through into this um agentic world, we really need to have all of these pieces uh before uh large enterprises are going to sign off and uh give the okay to um implement these.

06:14At the end of the day, there is going to be a human responsible like a chief legal officer, a chief policy officer and that will have to sign off and that person needs to feel 100% confident that the systems in place will not allow for um agents to hallucinate, to go off the rails, to overspend, um to break policy.

The officer who signs off, and the size of the fines

06:41Uh a lot of these compliance issues deal with large fines into the tens, hundreds, even billions of dollars. So these are really important um items and things to think about from a large enterprise and financial services perspective and governance simply hasn't caught up.

07:01We're again we're early days so we are part of building up what needs to be put in place from our view in terms of allowing this to scale. And that's why we're building Amperent. Um, so we're dealing with Agentic checkouts with a financial harness.

07:20And I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Prrenoff who is going to show us a demo. Right. All right. Thanks. All right. Like we said, for agents to be really useful, we need to give them tools. Right now they're being used for

Agents are only as good as the tools they can pay for

07:40coding. If you want to use them to build better things, you need to give them the right tools. As of right now, as a AI industry, we've given them a lot of MCP servers, but most of these MP MCP servers are free of cost. So there are two ways to make your agents really useful.

08:00One way is you can go to all these websites like Exop, Firecrawl and so many more which are getting more and more bigger with more MCP servers coming to play and you got to put in your credit card and you make your agent better or there is a better way that you can use an aggregator which has all the important tools to make your agent super powerful and that's why we built this marketplace and all you need is a skill

Demo: the same prompt with and without the skill file

08:31file installed in your agent. You can give your cloud code this skill file and everything else will be done for you. So I'm going to show you an experiment. We'll have uh this specific terminal with the amperson skill file and we'll have cloud code cloud co-working without the skill file and you'll see the difference is immense already.

08:47The reason is that most important MCP servers are going to be paid and you'll not put in your credit card to all these MCP servers. Rather what you'll do is use you'll use the agentic commerce tool or a platform or a wallet or a credit card to make that happen.

09:10And that's what what we enable. So let's just go on the terminal and install the ampus and scale file in one set. This is our website by the way where you can go. You copy the prompt and just like put in here. I already have it so I'm not going to uh sort of maybe it's fine.

09:26Uh install the skill file. And here I'm on the cloud coork, right? It does not have the skill file. Fair and square. This has the skill file. Now what I'll do is I'll tell them find the email information of the head of crypto and blockchain at Mastercard.

09:43All right. And I'll put in the same prompt. Uh I'll put in the same prompt for cloud cowork. Remember the only difference is this specific terminal of mine has the skill file which has paid MCP tools and this one does not. And you'll see that it is not able to like specifically find out, hey, we're not able to give you exactly the email, but this is how the email format is for our master card.

10:13And you can go ahead and find that out. But when I go to my terminal, it is already be able to it will already be able to give me the email specifically the Twitter and what where is he based and everything and beyond. This is just one example of telling you that agents are getting powerful through MCP.

10:29But these MCPs are not public services. They're going to be charged and you will not know that you're interacting with MCPS or installing it or going on their websites and getting the credit card. Rather, you'll just have a scale file which is a aggregator which can take care of your payments.

10:47in the background. What happened was if you go over here, you already can see that we did a transaction so that we could enable this surge for you because this is a paid endpoint that we had to specifically pay for to get what you specifically needed.

11:04So when we go to transactions, you should be able to find that we did a small transaction so that you would specifically get that specific information. uh 30 days on the maybe we skip to the next demo for now as you can see this spending happened.

11:30Let's skip to the next demo. I wanted to show you one more demo. In this what I've done is let's say I'm not a good kid which generally I am and I want to buy a father's day gift for my dad and I can also make that happen directly via the terminal.

11:38Shopify introduced UCP. Amazon might be coming up with its own thing, but what I'll do is I'll give it a specific command using Shopify UCP. Buy my father a Father's Day gift. Keep the gift less than $10. Let's see how this specific thing rolls.

12:06What uh will happen in this specific terminal case is that it will already be able to f locate certain shops online

Demo: an agent buying a gift under a set budget

12:16and find out what things can be given for father's day gift list them for me and be able to buy that directly via ampend wallet that we have created. your agent is as powerful as the paid MCP tools that you're connected to it and if you've given it a payment trail.

12:38So currently it's finding that out for us. Okay. See, this was an authorized transaction it did for finding me the email of that specific person at Mastercard, right? And these are all paid services or I would have to go on Xi and sort of put in my email card and get that.

13:02So, never leave your terminal. Just have a payment gateway and paid MCP tools and make your agents super super compatible and faster and give them more uh power. All right, it's currently finding some stuff for me. Let's see if it's able to come up with some recommendations that I can use and I can hear itself do a aentic checkout so I can buy something for my dad for Father's Day.

13:42What's good about this specific thing is that again and again I don't have to put in my name, my address, my phone number, anything. The agent already has the memory where it knows what do I like, what do I not like, and it will just give me specific things that I might want to buy for him.

13:58So, it already like, you know, total $9. This is what it is. Confirming the order and it already placed the bet and it already took $11 for that order complete. And here is your receipt. and my dad gets his $10 key directly via the agent. So this is just starting of what we call will be the future of agent e-iccommerce.

14:29It's not just buying gifts for your uh parents but rather it's much bigger. MCPs are becoming the normal norms of how your agents become super powerful and you might have already seen that Cloudflare is opening its gateway through X42 and agentic payments.

14:47If you go on a website and the agent is crawling that website then ads are irrelevant. How do people get paid? It's via agentic payments where a bot comes through Cloudflare, pays a microtransaction and gets all the information that's needed.

15:08So to make your agent super powerful, you need paid tools. We are in the era where most MCP tools are free. That's not going to be the case in the future. they're going to get paid and it will be it what your agent would need is good MCPS or an API which has an integration of MCPS and a wallet and this is what I'm trying to show you.

15:35So the specific bet has already been placed. I'm going to try to show you the transaction over here that was done and it's already settled and I might have gotten an email where Shopify was able to buy my dad a gift. Let's see if I open it and show it to you because it Yeah, it's okay.

15:50You guys are friends. See over here the order has been placed and I can already it's already getting tracked all via the agent terminal. I didn't have to even skip. Let's go to the last part which is all of this will be big if and only if like Rodrigo says

Demo: screening a sanctioned wallet

16:18there is compliance. Merchants will not take payments if they think this order is being placed by North Korean wallet. And for that you need the compliance layer to be fitting in as well. The seller and the buyer side both need to have that.

16:26And I've created this specific uh simulation for you in which we have a good claw that you can let me just close this right now. So now let's go to the third one which is compliant transactions right for the world and Amazon to accept agentic payments there needs to be compliance involved to make sure that the payment that's been done is not malicious.

16:57So we have a good claw that I'll spinning up that I'll be spinning up over here and we have a bad claw. The thing about bad claw is this is again a simulation but this is a sanctioned wallet address that means it has either interacted with North Korean entities or we were able to simulate it in a way that it is flagged right so no amount of transaction should be able to be done because it is out of the swift scope of policies.

17:26So if we go over here uh in this specific thing and I disable screening and save it, my good claw and my B bad claw both should be able to do transactions. Just to give you a little bit of periphery, this is the seller that is accepting payments.

17:42We have a small service of scraping websites and it needs to pay 0.1 cent to be able to take that scraping information. Right now because we don't have regulations both these transactions are going through and you can see it's getting authorized over

Compliance on, and the transaction rejects

18:04here. Right now what I'll do is using compliance I will enable the specific feature that we have built with TRM which scans the wallet and make sure that all the transactions are compliant and what it will do is that up till now everything has been working for good claw and bad claw but things will stop working for bad claw because using compliance we are able to scan that and we are able to give you see over here the your your transactions are getting blocked or rejected.

18:38And I can also show you over here that rejected and denied. And the reason behind the denying is because you're in the block listed wallet addresses. All to tell you that agentic commerce is becoming real. Agents need commerce more than humans need commerce.

18:55But it will not be the same. You will not go through payment guardrails of Stripe or any other of these checkout flows, but agents will have their own proprietary firms either through wallets or through their own credit cards. Agents would need to be superpowered.

19:10MCPs will get paid and more and more paid MCPs will come to reality to make your agent successful. That will only happen and only be successful in UX terms and more if you're able to empower your wallet with paid MCPs and a wallet infrastructure.

19:38If you want to know more about it, come to Ampend. We'll be here outside chatting if you have any questions. Thank you.