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 "name": "Machine Settlement Institutional Boundary",
 "text": "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.\n\nThe 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.",
 "author": {
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  "name": "Wulf A. Kaal",
  "identifier": "https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7840-1847"
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 "datePublished": "2026-08-26",
 "dateModified": "2026-08-26",
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  "tokenomics",
  "machine-settlement",
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  "evidence-provenance"
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  "The report examines distributed ledgers, smart contracts, and retail payments rather than sovereign agent runtimes or bilateral AI agents.",
  "The source is legal analysis, not empirical validation of a working machine economy or a particular runtime implementation.",
  "The report was published in 2017 and emphasizes European legal frameworks, so later legal and technical developments require separate verification.",
  "The report cautions that automated settlement software may operate as a tool rather than a standalone legally enforceable contract."
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  "name": "Impact of digital innovation on the processing of electronic payments and contracting: An overview of legal risks",
  "url": "https://doi.org/10.2866/201593"
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  "identifier": "kaal:claim:7314479-006",
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  "citation": "Wulf A. Kaal, Institutional Requirements for Sovereign Local Agent Runtimes (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7314479",
  "paper": "Wulf A. Kaal, Institutional Requirements for Sovereign Local Agent Runtimes",
  "authors": [
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  "year": "2026",
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 "mappingWhyRelevant": "The report independently establishes that software-executed value transfer cannot be classified only as a technical operation because contractual intent, counterparty identity, settlement finality, enforceability, liability, and dispute remain necessary. That mechanism directly extends Kaal's machine-settlement claim while remaining limited to DLT smart contracts and retail payments.",
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    "text": "Given the lack of a settled, commonly accepted definition of smart contracts, we would propose defining them as ‘contractual-type’ arrangements embedded in software, which the latter can validate, execute and record automatically, on a DLT platform, as soon as certain pre-programmed conditions, agreed upon by human agents, have been met, based on information fed into the DLT itself or received from a pre-defined (mostly external) source.",
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    "text": "platform participants (nodes) can use to ‘create’ markets, store logs of debts or promises, and move funds or other value in accordance with pre-determined instructions, free of human intermediation.",
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    "text": "In a Blockchain or in other DLT environment, automated (or automatable) contracts for the transfer of value could provide contracting parties with a greater degree of certainty in terms of the performance of their pre-determined contractual obligations, in accordance with the terms stored in their software.",
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    "text": "written on a permissioned and/or proprietary ledger, accessible to the members of a restricted group who know (or can at least ascertain the identity of) and trust one another",
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    "text": "an automated (or automatable) contract is apt to give rise to a dispute between its parties, in the same way that a conventional one can, in which case one would imagine the parties thereto to have an interest in accessing an arbitrator or a judicial instance to interpret and enforce its terms.",
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