Agent Spending Without Controls — Rodrigo Coelho & Pranav Maheshwari, Edge & Node

Pranav Maheshwari ran one prompt in two terminals: find the email address of the head of crypto and blockchain at Mastercard. The terminal without a payment skill file returned the company's email format and an invitation to work the rest out. The one with it paid a fraction of a cent to a metered endpoint and came back with the address, the person's location and their handle. That gap is the whole argument. Most MCP servers are free today, and his claim is that the useful ones will not stay free, which leaves an agent only as capable as the tools it can pay for. Rodrigo Coelho sets up the longer history first: Edge & Node built The Graph, served 1.8 trillion onchain queries, and shipped a query micropayment system in 2021 that cited the HTTP 402 spec years before Coinbase released x402. What stops enterprises adopting any of this, in Coelho's telling, is compliance rather than throughput. Traditional rails assume a human somewhere in the decision loop. Agents transact around the clock at machine speed, and a counterparty arrives as a bare wallet address with no identity attached to it. Somebody carrying a title like chief legal officer has to sign off, knowing that getting sanctions screening wrong carries fines in the billions. The closing demo makes that concrete. Two agents hit a metered scraping service, one from an ordinary wallet and one from a wallet flagged as sanctioned. With screening off, both transactions authorize. Switching screening on leaves the first working and rejects the second as a blocklisted address. Speaker info: - https://x.com/rodventures - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigoco/ - https://x.com/impranavm_ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thepranavmaheshwari/ Timestamps: 0:00 - The Graph, and paying for queries before x402 existed 2:03 - Prior art: micropayments, the 402 spec, and joining the foundation 3:52 - Rails built for humans in the loop, not machines 4:49 - Why enterprises stall without a compliance layer 5:42 - A wallet address with no identity behind it 6:37 - The officer who signs off, and the size of the fines 7:35 - Agents are only as good as the tools they can pay for 8:31 - Demo: the same prompt with and without the skill file 12:16 - Demo: an agent buying a gift under a set budget 16:14 - Demo: screening a sanctioned wallet 18:04 - Compliance on, and the transaction rejects