AI agents are buying, contracting, and transacting on behalf of humans. Payment rails (x402, MCP) are in place — but most production deployments still hand the agent an API key and rely on prompt-engineered guardrails to prevent over-spending or the wrong recipient. Lemma calls the missing layer the Agent Trust Chain — authority, spending limits, and the data underlying each transaction are issued as cryptographic attestations, so the receiving side can verify them independently before the transaction commits.
x402 protocol adoption, expanding MCP ecosystem, rapid growth of agent economy
- Prove which principal an agent represents — issued as a ZK attestation, verifiable on-chain or by any counterparty
- Bind spending limits to a cryptographic attestation, not to a raw API key or wallet
- Carry the upstream principal's authority through multi-step agent chains so it remains verifiable at the leaf
Agent Trust Chain and Trust402 — where the trust layer fits in agentic payments
Lemma proposes the Agent Trust Chain as the trust layer that sits in front of the agent payment step. Rather than handing agents API keys and hoping prompt-engineered guardrails hold, the layer issues authority, spending limits, and provenance as cryptographic attestations — verifiable on-chain or by any counterparty, before the transaction settles. Trust402 is Lemma's product that realizes this layer at the protocol level for x402-style agent payments.
Why this layer is needed now: agentic payments — transactions executed autonomously by AI agents — became a real category in 2024–2025 with x402, the Stripe Agent SDK, and MCP-driven tool use. The payment rail problem is largely solved. What remains is the trust question — who is the agent acting for, how much can it spend, and is the data underlying the payment authentic.
The delegated-treasury, multi-agent-workflows, and x402-commerce use cases linked above show how Trust402 and the surrounding pieces compose. For the broader conceptual scope of agentic payments, see the glossary entry.
Delegated Treasury
Issue agent spend authority as an on-chain spend-control attestation — not as a soft prompt. Book a 30-minute discovery call to see how it fits your operations.
Multi-Agent Workflows
Bind every multi-agent delegation step as a ZK proof. The final output carries a verifiable trace back to the original principal. Book a 30-minute discovery call to see how it fits your orchestration setup.
X402 Commerce
Verify seller attributes as ZK proofs before x402 settlement runs. Buyer agents transact without relying on plaintext claims. Book a 30-minute discovery call to see how it fits your stack.
What is agentic payments?
What is the relationship between x402 and Trust402?
How is the Delegated Treasury use case different from other solutions?
Where does provenance fit into agentic payments?
Ready to issue agent authority as cryptographic attestations — not soft prompts?
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