Signed Is Not Authorized: a live, bounded user mandate inside an x402 payment

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​Computing has always tracked what runs, where and how. An agent that pays, signs or decides for you adds a fourth question: on whose authority? Today the answer is a key, and a key cannot tell whether you allow this action now, within these limits. Anantha Krishnan, founder of Sarva Labs and the MOI protocol, shows how authority can be held as live state, and what it looks like when an x402 payment carries a mandate that only the participant can change. Part of the Standards block.

​Speaker

​Anantha Krishnan, Founder and CEO, Moi

​Anantha Krishnan is the Founder and CEO of Sarva Labs and MOI protocol and the inventor of Contextual Compute, a patented approach that adds "who" to the what, where and how of computing. Its first application is the MOI authority layer: on MOI, an AI agent acts only on a live, bounded and verifiable mandate from the person or business it works for, and only that participant can change it. His current work involves creating the participant layer of the internet and how to integrate true user authority inside x402 payments. He was earlier a core developer at Oracle and a Partner at Accenture, and is a graduate of IIT Bombay and NYU Stern. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

​X: @Arshasays · Moi: @moi_tech