This paper analyzes the x402 payment protocol, revealing critical synchronization and security flaws that allow attackers to exploit payment systems and force merchants to subsidize compute costs.

This paper analyzes the x402 agentic payment protocol, demonstrating through five concrete, practical attacks that it is vulnerable across multiple stages of its payment workflow.

The paper proposes a compliance-aware architecture for agentic payments on stablecoin rails that embeds regulatory checks directly into the on-chain execution flow to ensure safe, low-friction transfe…

APEX is a research system that adapts HTTP 402-style payment gating for autonomous agents, enabling programmatic spend governance using real-world fiat payment workflows like UPI.

The paper introduces presidio-hardened-x402, an open-source middleware that intercepts x402 payment requests to detect and redact PII and enforce spending policies before on-chain settlement.

The paper introduces ClawCoin, a novel tokenized, compute-cost-indexed unit of account designed to solve the problem of non-transferable compute costs in decentralized AI agent economies.

The paper systematizes the interaction between autonomous AI agents and blockchain platforms using a bidirectional trust framework, identifying significant gaps in current standards and proposing a ta…

The paper develops a unified, cross-layer security framework for autonomous LLM agents operating in agentic commerce, identifying key attack vectors and proposing a layered defense architecture.

The paper analyzes transaction fee mechanisms in modern blockchains that use parallel execution and contingency, proving an inherent trade-off between minimizing risks for users and maximizing revenue…

This study demonstrates that the publicly distributed firmware of ASIC cryptocurrency miners constitutes a primary and sufficient attack surface, allowing attackers to reconstruct internal architectur…

The paper estimates the quantum resources required to break 256-bit ECC cryptography and warns that fast-clock quantum computers could enable on-spend attacks on modern cryptocurrencies, necessitating…

The paper designs an optimal mechanism for soliciting expensive computational tasks in adversarial blockchain environments, showing that the loss of optimality scales logarithmically with the cost of…

The paper proposes BitSov, an eight-layer, Bitcoin-native architectural framework designed to build sovereign internet infrastructure by composing existing decentralized technologies.

This paper proposes a unified, lifecycle-centric framework and a detailed taxonomy to survey and analyze novel, finance-specific attack surfaces and vulnerabilities in AI systems used within the finan…

The paper demonstrates that current transfer-based AML systems fail in complex DeFi environments because economic value migration can be structurally decoupled from explicit token transfers.

The paper analyzes and documents various double-dip reward abuse attacks that exploit flaws in how cashback and reward engines handle transaction refunds, proposing formal invariants and defensive alg…

The paper analyzes the nascent DeFi investment agent market, finding that while token valuations are high, current deployments are heterogeneous, lack clear autonomous execution, and exhibit poor risk…

The paper empirically analyzes the nascent DeFi investment agent market, finding that while token valuations are high, current deployments lack robust autonomous execution and exhibit poor risk-adjust…

The paper proposes using Differentially Private (DP) synthetic data, specifically through tabular synthesis and DP-Seeded Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), to resolve the conflict between data utility and p…

The paper introduces Ark, a novel Bitcoin-compatible commit-chain that enables offchain transaction batching of virtual UTXOs (VTXOs) with a constant onchain footprint, solving scalability issues with…