Your AI Agent Doesn't Need a Wallet - It Needs a Treasury

Most AI agent frameworks tell you to "give your agent a wallet." So you generate a key pair, fund it with ETH for gas and USDC for payments, and hope nothing goes wrong. Now imagine you have 50 agents. That's 50 wallets, 50 private keys, 50 gas balances to monitor. One compromised key and an agent drains everything it holds. This is the wrong model. Agents should sign, not hold The mental shift: agents don't need wallets. They need permission to request payments from a vault they don't control. Here's the pattern: Owner deploys a vault (a smart contract they control) Owner registers agent public keys with spending limits Agent signs a payment intent (EIP-712 typed data) when it needs to pay for something Relayer validates the signature, checks policies, submits on-chain Vault verifies the agent is authorized and the amount is within limits The agent never holds funds. Never pays gas. Never has withdrawal access. What a payment intent looks like // Agent-side code import { AxonClient }