Macauley Peterson

Two days after <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/google-ai-payments-protocol-stablecoin">unveiling</a> AP2 — a universal payment layer for AI agents that supports everything from credit cards to stablecoins — <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/google">Google</a> and <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/eigenlayer">EigenLayer</a> have released <a href="https://x.com/eigenlayer/status/1968697050452869438">details</a> of their partnership to bring verifiability and restaking security to the stack, using <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/ethereum">Ethereum</a>.



In addition to enabling verifiable compute and slashing-backed payment coordination, <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/eigencloud-launch-a16z-eigenlayer">EigenCloud</a> will support insured and sovereign AI agents, which introduce consequences for failure or deviation from specified behavior.



Sovereign agents are positioned as autonomous actors that can own property, make decisions, and execute actions independently — think smart contracts with embedded intelligence.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">From demos to dollars</h2>



AP2 extends Google’s agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol using the HTTP 402 status code — long reserved for “payment required” — to standardize payment requests between agents across different networks. It already supports stablecoins like USDC, and Coinbase has demoed an agent checkout using its Wallet-as-a-Service.



Paired with a system like <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lit-protocol-vincent-ai-agents">Lit Protocol’s Vincent</a> — which enforces per-action policies and key custody at signing — Google’s AP2 with EigenCloud’s verifiability and cross-chain settlement could form an end-to-end trust loop.



Payments between agents aren’t as simple as they are often made to sound by “Crypto x AI” LARPs. When an AI agent requests a payment in <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/usdc">USDC</a> on <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/base">Base</a> and the payer’s funds are locked in ETH on <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/arbitrum">Arbitrum</a>, the transaction stalls — unless something abstracts the bridging, swapping and delivery. That’s where EigenCloud comes in.



Sreeram Kannan, founder of EigenLayer, said the integration will create agents that not only run on-chain verifiable compute, but are also economically incentivized to behave within programmable bounds.



Through restaked operators, EigenCloud powers a verifiable payment service that handles asset routing and <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/cross-chain-bridge">chain abstraction</a>, with dishonest behavior subject to slashing. It also introduces cryptographic accountability to the agents themselves, enabling proofs that an agent actually executed the task it was paid for.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Honestly, most of the “AI agent” hype falls apart once you ask: how do I trust this thing? This solves for that.&mdash; brutal (@crypto_brutal_) <a href="https://twitter.com/crypto_brutal_/status/1968699106785735043?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 18, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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It’s a crowded field, with many projects vying to anchor agent settlement and accountability; EigenCloud faces rivals ranging from Autonolas’ <a href="https://blockworks.co/price/olas">OLAS</a> staking layer and the <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/daily/issue/post_8f914d32-6a47-400b-b689-72368982abc3">Eliza</a> (formerly AI16z) agent developer ecosystem, to <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/near">NEAR’s Chain Signatures</a> intent stack, and <a href="https://blockworks.co/podcast/0xresearch/72d82e36-f79a-11ee-b172-db0b0936b9a2">Ritual’s verifiable AI compute</a>.



Still, if AP2 becomes the standard interface for billions of autonomous agents, EigenCloud’s restaked security and cross-chain payment verification could become indispensable infrastructure.



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Google Cloud taps EigenLayer to bring trust to agentic payments

Onchain AI agents are edging out of the lab.&nbsp;



Lit Protocol’s agent stack, Vincent, now gives developers a way to ship non-custodial automation that actually touches money, but under explicit, enforceable limits set by users and app authors. An “early access” launch just went live, Blockworks has learned exclusively.



Lit frames the core model simply: policies (guardrails) and abilities (discrete actions like swap/borrow/bridge) that are bound together at deploy time and enforced at runtime, according to co-founder David Sneider.



“Vincent Policies (the guardrails and controls) are created and exposed by Vincent application developers based on any given use case,” Sneider told Blockworks. “For example, a trading app might expose a ‘spend policy’ or ‘token allowlist policy,’ which users would be able to fine-tune based on their own needs and preferences.”



Under the hood, Vincent rides on Lit’s existing “defense-in-depth” key model: Threshold-split keys run inside <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/0xresearch-newsletter-mev-trusted-execution-environments">secure enclaves</a> (TEEs), and the enclaves execute only when an onchain policy check passes. In practice, that means permissions like spend caps, allowlists, time windows and rate limits are evaluated before any signing or contract call occurs. A key recent improvement is how easily developers can now package and enforce those rules through Vincent at the point of execution.



According to examples from a “<a href="https://github.com/LIT-Protocol/vincent-starter-kit">starter kit</a>,” developers can define and expose app-specific policies as needed; the platform now supports both narrowly scoped and broader smart-contract permissions, with one-line SDK calls to invoke them.



In Sneider’s view, the job is to let agents act, but only inside well-defined lanes.



That’s effective, according to David Johnston, the lead code maintainer at Morpheus, which has built in Lit Protocol as part of its reference open-source agent work.



“MPC enables good spending caps, whitelists of agents, and limited time approvals for agents to access user funds,” Johnston told Blockworks. “These types of capabilities should be native to all agents,” he said, adding that it’s safer to integrate Lit rather than “rolling their own, less battle-tested solutions.” 



DeFi-specific risk hooks like <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/mev">MEV</a> protection and dealing with oracles are being left to app authors. “They also have the power to define all of their data sources [and] integrations with external protocols, which can help address possible constraints like these,” Sneider said, referring to aspects like slippage caps, private order flow routes, RFQ checks, or price-staleness guards. That stance keeps the core platform minimal while allowing domain-specialized teams the flexibility to customize.



Automated agents are not magic, and Morpheus’ Johnston notes “all the normal attack vectors and failure modes from DeFi will apply to agents leveraging DeFi, so the best means of mitigating them is to leverage L2s that have eliminated many of these risks with their structure, such as ordering transactions to avoid attacks.”



Vincent already produces success and failure signals and proofs for every execution, but those remain local to the developer’s app rather than being published to a wider registry. The roadmap points to privacy-preserving attestations that could travel across registries and agent networks, such that compliance proven in one venue can be trusted in another.



“The bigger vision is that agents will be able to surface these attestations in privacy-preserving ways into shared registries like <a href="https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/erc-8004-trustless-agents/25098">ERC-8004</a> and interagent communication protocols like A2A [Agent-to-Agent],” Sneider said. Think verifiable credentials (e.g. “I’ve complied with XYZ policy 100 times”) broadcast into a shared agent ecosystem, where other agents or platforms can trust them without re-auditing.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Beyond DeFi</h2>



Crucially, the agent landscape is expected to evolve to new use cases other than pure DeFi automation, to encompass credentials and APIs that real businesses live on, said Sneider.



“Our focus at the moment is on managing more secret types, like passwords and API keys so that agents can log into apps and we can break the current paradigm of agents being embedded within apps,” he said. “We’re also continuing to build out more Policy and Ability examples across many different chains and protocols (i.e. BTC and Solana), to give developers more jumping-off points and make it simpler to start launching agents with Vincent.”



If this sounds like the agent version of account abstraction, it’s intentional. Back in 2024, Sneider argued that “key, material signing is like the ultimate unifier amongst distributed systems, which are really just like state and signing at the end of the day.”



Tie that to enforceable policies and you get something closer to production-grade autonomy, as we see starting to happen now.&nbsp;



“This idea that everybody is going to have essentially a quant in their pocket to manage their funds seems pretty, pretty coherent and is starting to come together.”



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