AI agents are moving off the screen and into financial systems — not as passive analytics, but as active participants that negotiate deals, set terms and move capital across decentralized rails where settlement can be final. For institutional crypto desks, that promises faster execution, new products and unfamiliar operational risks.
These risks are already visible. Consider two agents negotiating a derivatives contract that record different numbers: one books $100 million, the other $120 million. A $20 million discrepancy could cause payment failures, trigger regulatory probes or inflict major reputational damage. Similar failures have appeared outside finance — a UK health AI reportedly cited a non‑existent “Health Hospital” with a fake postcode, producing a false diagnosis and underscoring the danger of unverifiable inputs.
The root issue is simple: without a shared, verifiable memory, autonomous systems diverge. Conflicting records create cascading failures; opaque decision paths make remediation and accountability difficult. As automation becomes agentic — able to negotiate and commit value on our behalf — trust cannot be an afterthought.
To operate safely at scale, systems should be built on three core layers:
- Decentralized infrastructure: Eliminates single points of control, supports high-throughput settlement and prevents dependence on a single private operator.
- A trust layer: Embeds verifiability, identity and consensus at the protocol level so transactions and approvals are mutually recognized across domains.
- Verified AI agents: Enforce provenance, attestations and audit trails so an agent’s inputs, decisions and approvals can be traced and held accountable.
Operationally this means agents need three guarantees: consensus on what happened; provenance that links actions to identities and approvals; and auditability so every step can be inspected after the fact. These properties reduce systemic risk and make automated negotiation usable in regulated markets.
Policy and product choices matter. Enterprises should build on transparent, auditable systems; engineering teams must design identity and attestation primitives into agent workflows; and policymakers should back open-source, interoperable networks as the backbone of trusted AI. Trust is not a feature to bolt on — it’s an architectural imperative.
If the crypto and Web3 communities prioritize verifiability and accountability now, the agentic web can become a foundation for safer, composable financial infrastructure rather than a source of hidden fragility.
Source: CoinDesk. Read the original coverage for full details.