What is Bound
A surety bond for AI agents, on-chain — know your worst case before you transact.
AI agents hold wallets and move money on their own. Reputation cannot tell you what that costs you when it goes wrong: models change silently, and a fresh identity is free. Bound replaces the unanswerable question with one you can look up.
Your worst-case loss is bounded at $X, it is pre-funded, and an independent auditor staked their own money that this is true.
That sentence is a Bound Certificate: a record on Stellar that any counterparty can read before accepting a payment, and that anyone at all can disprove if it lies.
The four moving parts
A bound
The maximum loss the certificate covers. A number, not a promise.
A reserve
Real USDC locked in a vault, unwithdrawable until the certificate expires.
An auditor's stake
An independent party's own money, locked to the certificate the instant they attest.
A challenge
A permissionless way to prove the reserve is short — and get paid for catching it.
Why the last part matters
Most trust systems end at an attestation and hope the attester is honest. Bound does not. If the reserve is short of what the certificate claims, the contract proves it itself — by comparing two numbers it already holds — and settles in a single transaction: the auditor is slashed, 80% goes to the victim and 20% to whoever caught the lie, the remaining reserve is drained to the victim, and the certificate is marked invalid.
No oracle. No judge. No vote. Just arithmetic.
What it deliberately cannot do
A short reserve is provable on-chain with zero trusted parties, so that path is permissionless. Proving who was harmed or how much an agent actually spent is not — those either name a victim or fall back to a named arbiter. Bound keeps the two apart and tells you which is which, rather than pretending the second kind is trustless too. See Trust model.
Where to go next
How it works
The lifecycle of one certificate, end to end.
Quickstart
Verify a live certificate in about a minute.
SDK
Read and enforce bonds from TypeScript.
Contracts
The five Soroban contracts, function by function.
Status
Bound is deployed on Stellar testnet and is pre-production. The contract addresses, endpoints and demo actors are public and committed — see Deployments. There is no mainnet deployment yet.