PayFlow — Financial Authority for Autonomous Systems

Deterministic authorization, one-time execution grants and verifiable proof for AI-agent payments, with PayPal Sandbox integration.

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PayFlow — Financial Authority for Autonomous Systems

Inspiration and problem

AI agents can propose purchases and financial actions, but a generated instruction is not trustworthy authorization. Payments require exact, bounded authority, reliable handling of uncertain outcomes, and evidence explaining what happened.

What it does

PayFlow separates an agent's payment intent from permission to act. Its deterministic Trust Kernel evaluates a precisely scoped action against trusted authority and delegation constraints. The system can reserve authority, issue an exact-bound one-time execution grant, route an authorized action through its PayPal Sandbox adapter, classify provider outcomes as SUCCEEDED, FAILED, or UNKNOWN, and support lookup-only reconciliation and portable verification evidence.

How it was built

The public repository contains TypeScript/Node.js components, PostgreSQL persistence, PayPal Sandbox integration and tests, AI-intent integration via Groq, REST/OpenAPI and SDK foundations, MCP/A2A adapters, a console, and acceptance/evidence documentation. AI output is treated as untrusted intent rather than as a payment authorization. The documented capabilities are developer-preview and sandbox capabilities, not production money movement.

Development and evidence

This is an existing project, not a project created from scratch for the competition. Repository history and the evidence ledger document development during the hackathon period, including gateway, verification, console and sandbox work. Refer to the commit history and docs/GATE-EVALUATION.md for dated claims and scope. Some components are locally tested or preview-commissioned rather than independently accepted. Live production and public sandbox onboarding are not claimed. There are no verified customers, certification, audited security claims or live monetary transactions.

How to run and inspect

Follow the root README and docs/QUICKSTART-M7-M60.md. Node.js tooling and a disposable PostgreSQL test database are used for relevant integration validation. The deterministic external-agent example npx tsx examples/procurement-ap-agent.ts exercises the authority decision, UNKNOWN outcome, lookup-only reconciliation and changed-supplier refusal using a fake rail, not PayPal. PayPal-specific sandbox flows require separate sandbox configuration and acceptance. Public source: https://github.com/VictorCyberDev/PayFlow.

Challenges and next steps

The principal design challenge is preventing autonomous intent, delayed provider responses and repeated requests from silently widening or replaying financial authority. PayFlow emphasizes fail-closed evaluation and explicit UNKNOWN states. An unrestricted public live demo has not been commissioned, and a public submission video is not supplied here. These must not be represented as complete.

License

MIT (see repository LICENSE).

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