PRIMER
What actually makes a wallet ‘agentic’
Autonomy without custody is just an API key. The three properties that separate an agentic wallet from a scripted one.
8 min ·
The three properties
A wallet is agentic when the agent holds a signing capability of its own, when that capability is scoped by policy rather than by trust, and when every authorization it exercises is logged as a discrete, revocable event.
Anything missing one of those three is a scripted wallet: a human key with a cron job in front of it.
Why custody is the dividing line
Every issuer in the ledger answers the same question differently — where the key material lives while the agent is acting. Coinbase isolates it in an enclave, MetaMask leaves it with the user and delegates a scope, Cobo splits it across MPC shares, Human.tech splits it across two parties.
The architecture determines what an operator is liable for when an agent spends outside expectation, which is the only question that matters at scale.
Reading a launch claim
Ask for the revocation path, the maximum blast radius of a single compromised session, and whether limits are enforced at signing time or reconciled after settlement. Marketing pages rarely answer any of the three; custody documentation usually does.