Rules Emerge to Manage On-Chain Risk in Agentic Transactions – Digital Transactions
As spending enabled by stablecoins picks up momentum, payments players are beginning to see a need to guard against agentic transaction fraud involving cryptocurrency as the medium of exchange.
The latest example of this unfolding concern emerged Thursday. Contending that “blockchain analytics was built for a pre-agentic world,” London-based risk-management firm Elliptic released its Elliptic Standard, a set of eight rules to manage on-chain risk in agentic transactions.
The concern comes as crypto-based agentic transactions grew fully 522% between May 31 and Aug. 31, according to an analysis by Elliptic. A count of the transaction totals was not immediately available. Elliptic cites data from Artemis Analytics projecting that overall spending based on stablecoins hit $33 trillion last year.
“We need a new approach … built on an operating system that can execute at agentic speed,” said Simone Maini, chief executive at Elliptic, in a statement. “A criminal only needs to be right once. Our customers need to be right every time, and that only holds if we stop bad actors at the door, not investigate them afterwards.”
Agentic commerce involves bits of code that shop and pay online on behalf of consumers, who designate what they’re shopping for and how much they’ll pay. But concern regarding fraud and rogue agents has surfaced in recent months and has now won the attention of risk managers that deal in cryptocurrency. “Human oversight has to be built into these systems from the start, not added when something goes wrong,” said Joanna Marathakis, Circle Interet’s vice president for Financial crimes compliance, in a statement.
Elliptic’s eight rules for what it calls a “defensible, regulator-credible agentic risk intelligence system” involve: data quality; model transparency; AI safety; choice among models; configurability; human oversight; business resilience; and employee training. “Business resilience” refers to fallback rules that allow the business to stay in control.
