Secure Autonomous Agent Payments: Verifying Authenticity and Intent in a Trustless Environment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a blockchain-based framework that ensures the authenticity and intent of AI-initiated transactions in a trustless environment, enhancing security and accountability for autonomous agents.

Contribution

It proposes a novel hybrid on-chain/off-chain system using decentralized identities, verifiable credentials, and zero-knowledge proofs to verify AI agent transactions and intents.

Findings

Demonstrates resistance to impersonation and unauthorized transactions.

Provides an immutable audit trail linking user intent to payments.

Ensures privacy while verifying policy compliance.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are increasingly capable of initiating financial transactions on behalf of users or other agents. This evolution introduces a fundamental challenge: verifying both the authenticity of an autonomous agent and the true intent behind its transactions in a decentralized, trustless environment. Traditional payment systems assume human authorization, but autonomous, agent-led payments remove that safeguard. This paper presents a blockchain-based framework that cryptographically authenticates and verifies the intent of every AI-initiated transaction. The proposed system leverages decentralized identity (DID) standards and verifiable credentials to establish agent identities, on-chain intent proofs to record user authorization, and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to preserve privacy while ensuring policy compliance. Additionally, secure execution environments (TEE-based attestations) guarantee the integrity of agent reasoning and execution. The hybrid on-chain/off-chain architecture provides an immutable audit trail linking user intent to payment outcome. Through qualitative analysis, the framework demonstrates strong resistance to impersonation, unauthorized transactions, and misalignment of intent. This work lays the foundation for secure, auditable, and intent-aware autonomous economic agents, enabling a future of verifiable trust and accountability in AI-driven financial ecosystems.