Agent Spending Without Controls — Rodrigo Coelho & Pranav Maheshwari, Edge & Node

Alright, thanks for having me. Uh, today we're going to be speaking about Ampersand and agent spending without controls, which is the missing infrastructure layer for AI payments. A little bit about myself: I'm CEO of Edge & Node. For those that aren't aware, we were the team that built The Graph protocol.

For those that aren't aware of that, it is a blockchain data indexing protocol that's been around since 2018. We have a decentralized network. We've served 1.8 trillion queries over the years, of onchain data to applications utilizing blockchain data.

I've been a serial entrepreneur myself, and we've incubated a project within Edge & Node called Ampersand in the ejected commerce space, which is what we're going to be talking about today. And so, we're all aware that payments have been online for the past 30 years.

You know, starting in 1981, we had our first electronic transaction. And fast forward, we had a multi-decade transition, and this is from credit card payments to online e-commerce payments. Fast forwarding all the way to today, where we have the rise of the agent economy and unlocking a new wave of economic value.

And now we have LLMs and agents that can transact. And we have this underlying payment infrastructure that's been around for decades, and it's being rebuilt today for the agentic economy. And we've heard from many speakers here about how that's being done.

We're going to be discussing today our perspective and angle on it. So we ourselves at Edge & Node were really early into the agentic commerce world. We actually developed a micropayment system for queries back in 2021. We already referenced the 402 spec back then in a blog post.

And so, back in late 2024, we were looking into agents and how they would interact with data, how they would pay for it, specifically for The Graph protocol itself and making micropayments for queries. And in our research, we were kind of looking at how this could happen.

And then a few weeks later, x402 was released by Coinbase. So we jumped on immediately with the Coinbase team, with the Google team, started to collaborate to the x402 spec. We've joined the foundation. We've contributed to the x402 spec ourselves, leveraging some of our prior art on the micropayment system and batching protocol as part of how it could be utilized to reduce gas fees when you're dealing in nano payments.

Circle themselves came out with their own kind of version of it called nano payments. So we were also working in similar veins. And so, we've seen an explosion of companies emerge, solutions, technologies, and this kind of ejected commerce map.

You can see on the screen here that there's a vast array of companies more added every day. It's really burgeoning. And, you know, we're just one little piece in here of people developing, you know, infrastructure, payment protocols, governance, etc.

And so, traditional payment rails, though, were built for humans. You know, when we're dealing with, like, financial institutions specifically, there's kind of a human-in-the-loop that sets the decision-making process of whether that payment is allowed to go through. But we're dealing with agents that transact at machine speed and around the clock.

And like you're saying, all these controls and policies and rules were built for humans and not for

machines that don't breathe,right? So we're dealing in microsecond machine speed, and it's just simply not going to work in the way it has. And so, we need a new method of doing that. You can see a lot of the transactions exploding.

This is sort of over time. We're seeing transaction growth over x402. We're all saying, "This is coming." It is still early days. Ourselves, we're seeing a lot of experimentation, kind of with OpenClaw, people making retail payments on an experimental basis.

Still not on the enterprise side as we're talking to many teams. Definitely, everyone's looking at it and building kind of the infrastructure for when these use cases break through. And so, that's part of what we'll be displaying today with Ampersand.

But in order for this to really break through, we need a compliance layer. Specifically, when you're dealing with, like, you know, almost a quadrillion-dollar industry of the traditional financial world, there's a set of rules, policies, and guidelines that need to be in place before anything can happen.

Beyond just a credit card transaction, we're dealing with trillions and trillions of dollars being transacted across the globe. And so, we're going to be honing in a bit on that as part of the presentation today and the demo that's coming up.

But the compliance layer is literally like, is this counterparty a non-sanctioned entity? Is this counterparty, have they been involved in terrorist activity? Who is the identity behind this? And when you're dealing with agentic systems, it's just simply you're presented with just a wallet address with no kind of background information on that.

And we need these infrastructure layers in place

to enable and facilitate enterprises to feel comfortable to adopt this technology. All of these systems exist in the existing world today. But as we're breaking through into this agentic world, we really need to have all of these pieces before large enterprises are going to sign off and give the okay to implement these.

At the end of the day, there is going to be a human responsible, like a chief legal officer, a chief policy officer, that will have to sign off. And that person needs to feel 100% confident that the systems in place will not allow for

agents to hallucinate, to go off the rails, to overspend, to break policy. A lot of these compliance issues deal with large fines into the tens, hundreds, even billions of dollars. So these are really important

items and things to think about from a large enterprise and financial services perspective. And governance simply hasn't caught up. We're, again, we're early days. So we are part of building up what needs to be put in place from our view in terms of allowing this to scale.

And that's why we're building Ampersand. So we're dealing with agentic checkouts with a financial harness. And I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Pranav, who is going to show us a demo. Alright?

Alright.

Thanks.

Can you hear me?

Alright. Like we said, for agents to be really useful, we need to give them tools. Right now they're being used for coding. If you want to use them to build better things, you need to give them theright tools.

As ofright now, as an AI industry, we've given them a lot of MCP servers. But most of these MCP servers are free of cost. So there are two ways to make your agents really useful. One way is you can go to all these websites like XR, Firecrawl, and so many more, which are getting more and more bigger with more MCP servers coming to play.

And you got to put in your credit card and make your agent better. Or there is a better way that you can use an aggregator, which has all the important tools to make your agent super powerful. And that's why we built this marketplace.

And all you need is a skill file installed in your agent. You can give your cloud call this skill file, and everything else will be done for you. So I'm going to show you an experiment. We'll have this specific terminal with the Ampersand skill file, and we'll have Claude Cowork working without the skill file.

And you'll see the difference is immense already. The reason is that most important MCP servers are going to be paid, and you'll not put in your credit card to all these MCP servers. Rather, what you'll do is you'll use an agentic commerce tool or a platform or a wallet or a credit card to make that happen.

And that's what we enable. So let's just go on the terminal and install the Ampersand skill file in one sec. This is our website, by the way, where you can go. You copy the prompt and just, like, put in here.

I already have it, so I'm not going to sort of maybe it's fine. Install the skill file. And here I'm on the Claude Cowork,right? It does not have the skill file. Fair and square. This has the skill file.

Now, what I'll do is I'll tell them, "Find the email information of the head of crypto and blockchain at Mastercard,"right? And I'll put in the same prompt. I'll put in the same prompt for Claude Cowork. Remember, the only difference is this specific terminal of mine has the skill file, which has paid MCP tools, and this one does not.

And you'll see that it is not able to, like, specifically find out, "Hey, we're not able to give you exactly the email, but this is how the email format is for Mastercard, and you can go ahead and find that out."

But when I go to my terminal, it is already able to it will already be able to give me the email specifically, the Twitter, and where is he based, and everything and beyond. This is just one example of telling you that agents are getting powerful through MCP, but these MCPs are not public services.

They're going to be charged. And you will not know that you're interacting with MCPs or installing it or going on their websites and getting the credit card. Rather, you'll just have a skill file, which is an aggregator, which can take care of your payments.

In the background, what happened was, if you go over here, you already can see that we did a transaction so that we could enable this search for you. Because this is a paid endpoint that we had to specifically pay for to get what you specifically needed.

So when you go to transactions, you should be able to find that we did a small transaction so that you would specifically get that specific information.

30 days on the maybe we skip to the next demo for now. As you can see, this spending happened. Let's skip to the next demo. I wanted to show you one more demo. In this, what I've done is, let's say, I'm not a good kid, which generally I am, and I want to buy a Father's Day gift for my dad.

And I can also make that happen directly via the terminal. Shopify introduced UCP. Amazon might be coming up with its own thing. But what I'll do is I'll give it a specific command. Using Shopify UCP, buy my father a Father's Day gift.

Keep the gift less than $10. Let's see how this specific thing rolls. What will happen in this specific terminal case is that it will already be able to locate certain shops online and find out what things can be given for Father's Day gift, list them for me, and be able to buy that directly via Ampersand wallet that we have created.

Your agent is as powerful as the paid MCP tools that you have connected to it, and if you've given it a payment trail.

So currently, it's finding that out for us. OK, Ampersand agents.

See, this was an authorized transaction it did for finding me the email of that specific person at Mastercard,right? And these are all paid services. Or I would have to go on X and sort of put in my email card and get that.

So never leave your terminal. Just have a payment gateway and paid MCP tools and make your agents super, super compatible and faster and give them more

power.

Alright. It's currently finding some stuff for me. Let's see if it's able to come up with some recommendations that I can use. And I can hear itself do an agentic checkout so I can buy something for my dad for Father's Day.

What's good about this specific thing is that, again and again, I don't have to put in my name, my address, my phone number, anything. The agent already has the memory where it knows what do I like, what do I not like.

And it will just give me specific things that I might want to buy for him. So it already, like, you know, total $9. This is what it is, confirming the order. And it already plays the bet. And it already took $11 for that.

Order complete. And here is your receipt. And my dad gets his $10 key directly via the agent. So this is just the starting of what we call will be the future of agentic commerce. It's not just buying gifts for your parents, but rather, it's much bigger.

MCPs are becoming the normal norms of how your agents become super powerful. And you might have already seen that Cloudflare is opening its gateway through x402 and agentic payments. If you go on a website and the agent is scrolling that website, then ads are irrelevant.

How do people get paid? It's via agentic payments where a bot comes through Cloudflare, pays a microtransaction, and gets all the information that's needed. So to make your agent super powerful, you need paid tools. We are in the era where most MCP tools are free.

But that's not going to be the case in the future. They're going to get paid. And it will be what your agent would need is good MCPs or an API which has an integration of MCPs and a wallet.

And this is what I'm trying to show you. So the specific bet has already been paid. I'm going to try to show you the transaction over here that was done. And it's already settled. And I might have gotten an email where Shopify was able to buy my dad a gift.

Let's see if I open it and show it to you because it yeah, it's OK. You guys are friends. See, over here, the order has been placed. And I can already it's already getting tracked all via the agent terminal.

I didn't have to even skip. Let's go to the last part, which is all of this will be big if and only if, like Rodrigo says, there is compliance. Merchants will not take payments if they think this order is being placed by North Korean wallet.

And for that, you need the compliance layer to be fitting in as well. The seller and the buyer side both need to have that. And I've created this specific simulation for you in which we have a good claw that you can let me just close thisright now.

So now, let's go to the third one, which is compliant transactions,right? For the world and Amazon to accept agentic payments, there needs to be compliance involved to make sure that the payment that's being done is not malicious. So we have a good claw that I'll spinning up that I'll be spinning up over here.

And we have a bad claw. The thing about bad claw is this is, again, a simulation. But this is a sanctioned wallet address. That means it has either interacted with North Korean entities, or we were able to simulate it in a way that it is flagged,right?

So no amount of transaction should be able to be done because it is out of the SWIFT scope of policies. So if we go over here in this specific thing and I disable screening and save it, my good claw and my bad claw both should be able to do transactions.

Just to give you a little bit of periphery, this is the seller that is accepting payments. We have a small service of scraping websites. And it needs to pay 0.1 cent to be able to take that scraping information.

Right now, because we don't have regulations, both these transactions are going through. And you can see it's getting authorized over here,right? Now, what I'll do is, using compliance, I will enable this specific feature that we have built with TRM, which scans the wallet and makes sure that all the transactions are compliant.

And what it will do is that, up till now, everything has been working for good claw and bad claw. But things will stop working for bad claw. Because using compliance, we are able to scan that. And we are able to give you see over here, your transactions are getting blocked or rejected.

And I can also show you over here that rejected and denied. And the reason behind the denying is because you're in the blocklisted wallet addresses.

All to tell you that agentic commerce is becoming real. Agents need commerce more than humans need commerce. But it will not be the same. You will not go through payment guardrails of Stripe or any other of these checkout flows.

But agents will have their own proprietary forms either through wallets or through their own credit cards. Agents would need to be super powered. MCPs will get paid. And more and more paid MCPs will come to reality to make your agent successful.

That will only happen and only be successful in UX terms and more if you're able to empower your wallet with paid MCPs and a wallet infrastructure. If you want to know more about it, come to Ampersand. We'll be here outside chatting if you have any questions.

Thank you.