The challenge

Giving an AI agent the ability to pay for things today means handing over a private key — or pre-funding a hot wallet it fully controls. That is all-or-nothing custody: The net effect: autonomous agents that transact are a security liability, so most "AI + payments" demos either stay read-only or quietly trust a server-held key.

The approach

ven-AI replaces custody with programmable, bounded permission. You grant the agent a capped, revocable spending limit by signing an ERC-7710 delegation with your wallet — the agent transacts on its own, but the limits stay in your hands. Key insight: an agent does not need your keys to spend on your behalf — it needs a bounded delegation it can redelegate downward. The user signs once; the limits are enforced by the delegation, not by trust.

What we did

• //001Grant a budget, not a key
• //002The agent plans and delegates
• //003Each agent pays for what it uses
• //004Authority only narrows
• //005AI-native output
• //006Provable — every step returns delegation hashes + an activity trace