Extension: Impact of digital innovation on the processing of electronic payments and contracting: An overview of legal risks
Machine settlement is not only a transport function. Athanassiou's analysis of automated payments shows why. Smart contracts can validate, execute, and record pre-agreed responses without human intermediation. Once value moves, however, the arrangement raises questions about contractual intent, counterparty identity, settlement finality, liability, and access to adjudication when code fails or parties dispute the result. Automation therefore changes the institutional classification of the system even when the transfer protocol remains technically sound. The evidence is narrower than Kaal's claim. The ECB paper examines distributed ledgers, smart contracts, and retail payments rather than sovereign agent runtimes. It is legal analysis, not empirical evidence that a particular machine economy works. Its mechanism still carries. A runtime that can settle with another machine needs more than payment connectivity. It needs an attributable principal, a defined authorization boundary, an auditable record of the obligation, and a route for error correction and dispute. These requirements should be bound before execution. Otherwise a technically final transfer may leave the economic relation legally uncertain and institutionally unaccountable.
ai-and-agentsinstitutional-designtokenomicsmachine-settlementsmart-contractscontract-governancedispute-resolutionevidence-provenance