Delegated Authority in a New Financial System

Background

A future with agents transacting at scale needs a new financial system. Faster, cheaper rails. Trust, allocated to machines. A new way of thinking about identity.

As agents gain autonomy, that new system is taking shape. Google built AP2, a protocol for secure, compliant agent-to-merchant transactions. Stripe released Shared Payment Tokens, a primitive designed for agent spending.

In the coming years, standards will form and infrastructure will commoditize, but who will take responsibility when things go wrong? How will we know?

Introducing Even

Even sits above the stack, serving as both an authorization layer and a record of where money moved and why.

A developer sets daily agent limits. A founder assigns budgets, defines team policies, and revokes authorizations.

Every decision made is recorded to a verifiable ledger. Who authorized this agent? Which rail was used? What budget did it draw from? Even can tell you. And it can tell auditors, too.

In Practice

A customer in Japan gives travel.ai $5,000 to book flights and transfers for a multi-city European break. The company uses Even to enforce what an agent is authorized to spend: the agent selects a Tokyo-to-Paris flight for $1,200, Even checks the mandate, confirms the spend is within budget, authorizes the transaction, and records the decision.

Later, if the customer disputes a transaction or the company needs to show what happened, it can point to Even’s verifiable ledger.

Conclusion

We hear of a world not so far away where agents are handed the keys while we enjoy nature or read a book. Evocative, yes, but it’s hard to imagine it happens without guardrails.

Even is built around one simple belief: if money’s moving, humans are in the loop.

— founders@even.la