Provable Authority: A Protocol for Verifiable Authority Resolution and Control Across Human, Organizational, and Agentic Transactions

Abstract

Payment systems authenticate users, devices, accounts, and cryptographic credentials, but a relying party, such as a counterparty, payment rail, marketplace, or autonomous agent runtime, generally cannot obtain compact, independently verifiable evidence that the party presenting one exact transaction holds current organizational authority to execute it under the applicable evidence, policy, budget, and approval state. Agentic commerce makes this gap operationally urgent: a software agent can produce a valid signature while acting outside its delegated purpose, after its sponsor's authority has changed, or on transaction details that differ from those a human approved. We describe the ChainIT Authority Protocol, a subject-neutral and rail-neutral pre-execution authority and evidence control plane. The protocol separates durable identity, a versioned organizational authority record (the Authority Resolution Pactvera), sourced evidence assertions, deterministic reason-coded policy predicates, and organization-configured dispositions; binds each decision and human approval to a canonical transaction digest; reserves capacity atomically so that limits hold under concurrency; and authorizes commit only through a single-use, sender-constrained Execution Authorization Credential consumed at the rail adapter, with append-only lifecycle evidence sealed after the terminal outcome. An Agent Subject Profile adds the workload registration, attested key hierarchy, and sovereignty boundary required when the acting subject is an AI agent, without introducing a separate authority concept. We specify the commit-time execution predicate and bounded-freshness status rules, give enforcement profiles for fiat (ACH, wire, card, instant payment) and stablecoin rails, and state residual risks and non-goals.