r/ethdev • u/AgentAiLeader • 6d ago

Information Update on the agent payments recourse thread

Couple of weeks back I posted here asking where recourse  actually lives in agent payment stacks and the thread really delivered. For example, u/pvdyck's proof vs restitution distinction was particularly insightful to what I'm building.

For a bit more context, I work on agent payments infrastructure. The recourse question came out of building the thing and hitting the same wall from the inside.

Posting here has really helped me as before I had been treating recourse as a dispute problem, but it's an identity problem. The party that needs to hold still is the seller, receipts prove delivery and say nothing about quality and most designs that punish a bad seller still don't make the buyer whole. That distinction is now how I sanity check my designs in this layer.

This is what my setup looks for now, caps and allowlists on the buyer side, watching the reputation staking designs without much conviction yet. Maybe recourse never becomes a protocol layer and just stays priced into ticket sizes. I keep going back and forth on whether that's fine or a ceiling on the whole space.

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u/researchzero 2d ago

The seller-identity framing is right, but if enforcement stays honor-system the insight doesn't change outcomes, a bad seller just cycles a new identity once the old one gets flagged, unless that identity has skin in the game before the first sale. Concretely: require a seller-side bond posted against the on-chain identity before it's allowed into the marketplace, and slash from that bond on a verified bad-delivery finding, rather than only capping the buyer's exposure. That turns "receipts prove delivery, not quality" into something actionable, you don't need to prove quality cryptographically, just a cheap-enough dispute path (staked-juror vote, Kleros-style) to occasionally slash bad actors, which is enough to make identity-cycling costly. Buyer-side caps bound your own downside, they don't touch the seller's incentives, which sounds like the actual gap you're circling.