What's this about?
Autonomous agents are becoming the interface for decentralized finance actions — swaps, lending, yield management. Because those agents are driven by language models, an error or a manipulation becomes an irreversible transaction. PACE proposes policy-attested contract execution: agent actions are checked against an attested policy before they execute.
What exactly is "attested" execution?
An attestation is a cryptographic proof that something is what it claims to be. Here it means the policy governing what the agent may do — spending limits, allowed counterparties, permitted operations — is committed to in a way that can be verified independently, and the execution layer checks each proposed action against it before letting it through. The crucial property is that the check doesn't depend on the agent's cooperation. A prompt asking an agent to stay within limits is a request; a contract that refuses out-of-policy transactions is a constraint.
Why is this worth noticing?
- It's the same architectural answer as Mandato's signed mandates from a different domain, which suggests convergence: enforcement belongs at the protocol layer, not in the prompt.
- DeFi is where this gets tested first because the consequences are immediate and financial, and there's no intermediary to reverse a mistake.