AI Agent Payment Authorization: Technical Architecture

Traditional payment systems were built around human actors with pre-established trust relationships. A bank knows you through KYC verification. A merchant trusts you through your transaction history. But AI agents operate in a fundamentally different context:

Solving this requires rethinking payment authorization from first principles. Instead of asking "do we trust this entity," we ask "can we verify this transaction satisfies objective eligibility criteria?"

At the core of AffixIO's authorization framework is binary eligibility verification,the ability to answer yes/no questions about transaction eligibility without relying on mutable state.

Agent initiates payment authorization request: All authorization data is self-contained in the request, including cryptographic proofs of agent identity, eligibility, and user consent. No external queries required.

Rather than querying a database, merchants receive cryptographically signed eligibility proofs from authoritative sources. The proof contains everything needed to verify eligibility without querying the issuer again. The merchant verifies: the Merkle proof against the published root hash, the issuer's signature using their public key, and the timestamp is within validity bounds.

1. Request: Agent submits authorization request with eligibility proofs and cryptographic signatures

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