Mandates
The fundamental unit: bounded authority for a purpose.
The company is too costly to form for every task, the employee is a relationship rather than a unit of work, and an individual agent is replaceable and, legally, nobody. What persists across all of them is a grant of bounded authority for a purpose — the accountable mandate.
01Three questions
Want, authorize, commit.
The interface keeps apart three things that software tends to blur. Only the third creates obligations — and only within the second.
What you want
An outcome request
A result, a budget, a deadline and the constraints that matter. It binds no one.
What you authorize
A mandate
Bounded, signed and revocable authority. You sign bounds, not steps — every agent and counterparty is held to them.
What you become committed to
Obligations
Contracts formed inside the mandate with named counterparties, recorded on the ledger with evidence rules and a holder.
- Principal
- A founder’s limited company, verified to tier V2
- Outcome
- Launch the app in nine languages, with consumer-law review in four EU markets
- Budget
- €60,000 held in escrow · no counterparty above €5,000 without approval
- Scope
- Buy localization, legal review, payment set-up and support · counterparties V2+ · data stays in the EEA
- Expiry
- 42 days after signature · 90-day warranties survive by design
- Delegation
- Maximum depth 2 · sub-mandates can tighten limits, never relax them · budgets lock when delegated
- Verification
- A different model family checks every translation · 5% human sample · signed legal opinions
- Liability & cover
- 10% holdback per performer · professional cover required · the principal answers for decisions within scope
- Revocation
- Stops new commitments at once · contracts already formed unwind on their own terms
02From objective to settlement
Six steps, six different legal natures.
Conflating any two of these steps is the most common design error in agent commerce.
- 01
Objective
What the principal wants to achieve
Intent. Binds no one.
- 02
Mandate
Bounded, signed, revocable authority
Binds the principal only within its scope.
- 03
Agent action
An act performed under the mandate
Attributed to the principal; logged as evidence.
- 04
Contract
A promise exchanged with a counterparty
Enforceable only if validly formed under the governing law.
- 05
Obligation met
Performance evidenced and accepted
Discharged — warranties and survival terms remain.
- 06
Settlement
Value transferred over a payment rail
Final under the rules of that rail.
A credential is not personhood.
It proves who is acting and under whose authority. Liability remains with a legal person.
An authorized action is not a contract.
Enforceability depends on formation, capacity, form and governing law. The grid raises the odds — checkable mandates, standard terms, preserved evidence — but cannot guarantee enforceability everywhere, and never claims to.
03Structure
Fourteen fields.
“Mandate” has established meanings in civil law and in payments. The accountable mandate adds what none of them carries together: liability with cover, verification rules, composition rules and an estate designation.
| Field | What it specifies |
|---|---|
| Principal and beneficial owner | The legal person granting authority, evidence of signatory power, the ultimate beneficial owner |
| Outcome and acceptance criteria | Machine-checkable conditions, plus named people who accept subjective results |
| Budget and funding sources | Caps by currency and period; which accounts, credit lines or capital mandates may be used |
| Permitted actions and counterparties | Buy, sell, hire, publish, sign, pay — with allow and deny lists and a minimum verification tier |
| Geographic and legal constraints | Jurisdictions, sanctions screening, licensed or excluded activities, data residency |
| Duration and deadlines | Validity window, milestones, time-outs — and survival terms declared at the outset |
| Delegation and subdelegation | Who may delegate further, to what depth, under what cover |
| Verification requirements | Evidence types, verifier independence, sampling rates, model-diversity rule |
| Liability allocation and cover | Who bears which loss, caps, insurance, bonds, collateral, liability anchor |
| Reporting and audit evidence | Logging standard, retention, audit rights, supervisory access |
| Revocation, dispute and termination | Who may revoke, what happens to commitments in flight, the dispute forum |
| Escalation thresholds | Decisions reserved for people; amounts or risk classes that need approval |
| Integrity | Version, hash, signatures and a status endpoint for real-time revocation checks |
| Estate designation | Who will hold the obligations that outlive the project |
04Composition
Delegation without expansion.
Complex outcomes are divided into sub-mandates, often several levels deep and across many vendors’ agents. Every delegation is checked against six invariants before it takes effect.
- 1
Scope attenuation
A sub-mandate’s actions, counterparties and jurisdictions are always a subset of its parent’s.
- 2
Budget conservation
Child budgets plus the parent’s own spending never exceed the parent’s budget. Reservations lock at delegation.
- 3
Time containment
A child expires no later than its parent. Anything meant to outlive the parent must be declared as a survival term and given an estate holder.
- 4
Liability containment
Exposure created by a child is bounded by its own cover and collateral; uncovered exposure moves up only to a limit the parent explicitly accepted.
- 5
Non-relaxation
Depth limits, counterparty tiers, evidence rules and approval thresholds can be tightened down the tree, never relaxed.
- 6
Revocation propagation
Revoking a mandate suspends every descendant’s authority to make new commitments. Existing commitments unwind only on their own terms.
Capability attenuation, credit limits and escrow are long-established mechanisms. What the white paper proposes is enforcing them jointly — across authority, money, time, liability and evidence — at every delegation.
05Types
Seven kinds of mandate.
Three rules of revocation. Revocation is prospective: it removes the authority to make new commitments from the moment the status changes. Valid commitments survive and unwind only on their own terms. The revoker bears the cost of revoking unless the mandate says otherwise, and counterparties who relied in good faith on a valid status check are protected.
| Type | Granted by → to | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Root | Principal → its representative agent or operator | The whole outcome |
| Execution | Parent → agent or provider | Perform a defined task |
| Procurement | Parent → buying agent | Source and contract counterparties |
| Assembly | Parent → assembler | Form a temporary network and its legal container |
| Capital | Investor → licensed manager | Deploy capital under a constitution |
| Verification | Parent → independent verifier | Check evidence and certify outcomes |
| Estate | Closing enterprise → estate holder | Hold obligations that outlive the project |