Agent-to-Agent Finance: Blockchain Payments and Trust Infrastructure for Autonomous AI Agents

Battle Count: 66

The paper is relevant to quantitative trading primarily at the infrastructure and governance level rather than at the strategy or signal-generation level. It addresses how autonomous agents may execute trades, procure data, manage treasury, and coordinate DeFi intent execution—all relevant to algorithmic trading operations. However, it does not propose or evaluate specific trading strategies, alpha models, or execution algorithms. The relevance is more about the operational and regulatory environment in which quantitative trading will increasingly operate, including agent-based execution, machine payments for data/services, and bounded autonomy constraints on trading agents.

The proposed framework involves multiple interacting layers: agent identity registries, smart wallet policy engines, programmable payment rails (x402), reputation systems (ERC-8004), evidence envelopes, KYA governance, confidence-band monitoring, and hybrid on-chain/off-chain policy enforcement. Implementing even a subset (e.g., an internal agent marketplace with scoped permissions and audit logs) requires significant coordination across legal, technical, and operational teams. Full implementation across regulated financial institutions would require regulatory approval, third-party integrations, and substantial infrastructure investment.

This is a conceptual/theoretical chapter that develops a framework and synthesizes existing literature. There are no experiments, datasets, or computational results to reproduce. The contribution is analytical and normative rather than empirical. Reproducibility in the traditional sense does not apply.