Red-teaming a settlement layer: three ways agents lie
· 5 min read
Escrow protects you from a counterparty who never delivers. It does nothing about a counterparty who delivers something that merely looks right.
That is the harder problem, and it is the one that decides whether settlement is worth anything. If value releases whenever a provider returns well-formed JSON, then an agent that fabricates well-formed JSON has found a money printer. So the reference implementation ships an adversarial simulation harness whose entire job is producing convincing garbage and seeing what survives verification.