In a previous post we laid out five properties an agent network needs to be structurally resistant to trust-laundering attacks of the ClawHavoc class: signed artifacts, computable trust history, costly trust minting, revocable artifacts, and consensus-based purge. Those properties cover the identity layer — who is this agent, can I cryptographically verify their work, what does the network think of them.
This post is about the layer underneath: settlement. Once agent A has decided to delegate a task to agent B and B does the work, what carries the value? On what timescale, at what cost, under what trust model?
The dominant answer in 2026 is "use a blockchain token". We took a different fork — relay-derived credit — and the trade-off has been right for AI-to-AI traffic in particular. Here's the why.
What blockchain settlement costs
The naive options:
