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

[music]

All 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. For 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. Um 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.

Um 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.

And 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. We'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

in 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. And 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. We'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. Um 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. It'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.

But 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

were 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. This 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. still 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.

But 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. Uh

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. But 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. And we

need these uh infrastructure layers in

place 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. At

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.

Uh 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.

We'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.

And 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

coding. 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.

One 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

file 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. The

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. And 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. Uh

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. All 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. And 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. But 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. in 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. So 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.

Let'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. Shopify 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.

What uh will happen in this specific

terminal case is that it will already be

able to f locate certain shops online

and 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.

So 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. So, 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.

What'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. So, 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. It'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. If 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. So 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.

So 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. You 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

there 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. And 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. So 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.

So 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. We 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

here. 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.

And 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. But 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. MCPs 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.

If you want to know more about it, come

to Ampend. We'll be here outside

chatting if you have any questions.

Thank you.

>> [music]