AlgoVoi launches KYC-screened agent payments across seven chains

When the payer is a machine, who gets the KYC?

An AI agent calls an API, the server answers with HTTP 402 Payment Required, the agent moves USDC — Circle's dollar stablecoin — on-chain, and a proof of payment unlocks the response. x402, the emerging standard for autonomous real-time payments over HTTP (typically pay-per-use APIs and microtransactions), makes that flow possible; AlgoVoi¹ is built around the question the protocol leaves open: who spent the money, and was the recipient screened before the funds moved?

AlgoVoi's answer is a compliance layer wrapped around four machine-payment protocols across Algorand, VOI, Hedera, Stellar, Base, Solana and Tempo. Every payment passes KYC (know-your-customer) and KYB (know-your-business) identity checks, sanctions screening against OFSI, OFAC, UN and EU lists refreshed daily, an MLRO (money-laundering reporting officer) audit trail and a suspicious-activity-report pipeline, with data encrypted at rest via Fernet keys. The site's slogan — 'Compliance as an enabler, not a cost' — captures the pitch: run the compliance machinery once, and agents can pay without a human re-approving each transaction. Algorand's mechanics matter here: low fees and single-block finality are what make per-request micropayments practical without stalling synchronous request-response flows, a point the Algorand Foundation's x402 explainer² makes — x402 went fully supported on Algorand in February, with a Global x402 Challenge in June.

The operation behind it is small. The privacy policy names Christopher Hopley as the UK GDPR data controller, and the site bills itself 'UK-registered' — yet Companies House³ returns no company under the AlgoVoi, chopmob, AlgoVoi-Hand or ilovechicken names, and Hopley's only director appointments on the register, at two Searchability companies, are both resigned.

One receipt layer for four protocols

Each of the four standards answers how a machine pays; none of them, AlgoVoi's docs⁴ argue, leaves a portable record a supervisor can re-check years later, offline, without trusting whoever kept the logs. That record is AlgoVoi's core artefact.

The receipt itself is a categorical ALLOW, REFER or DENY verdict from an admission-time sanctions, PEP and AML screen, signed with Falcon-1024 (a NIST Level 5 post-quantum signature scheme) and free of personal data: the payer's address goes in, only sha256(network:address) comes out. Because the receipt is canonicalised under JCS (RFC 8785¹), which fixes one byte sequence per JSON object, and hashed with SHA-256 into an action_ref, anyone can re-derive the hash from the disclosed fields with stock open-source tools. Merchants bring their own screening provider — Chainalysis, TRM, Elliptic or an internal list — while AlgoVoi certifies the verdict and never holds the sanctions data. One live detail is worth noting: the production gateway's public attestation endpoint documents this stack, and its own response currently reports sanctions_enabled: false, so the configured screening is a thing to verify rather than assume.

Writing the standard it sells

The receipts rest on a canonicalisation discipline AlgoVoi authors itself: six sole-authored IETF Internet-Drafts under Independent Submission, Informational status, covering canonicalisation, compliance receipts, settlement attestations, cancellation, refunds and composite-trust-query, with the core draft at revision -04⁵ (May 2026, expiring 30 November). The project publishes two attestation runs totalling 512² byte-for-byte cross-validation agreements (192 on 24 May, 320 on 25 May) across nine independent JCS implementations and seven vector sets, and maintains a Substrate Adopters Registry whose three entries — AlgoVoi itself, Supership/Crest and PEAC Protocol — are self-declared. One caveat applies to all of it: the attestations, the registry and the security overview are AlgoVoi's own publications, and the drafts are not standards-track, so the claims verify as code, not as third-party audits.

What is independently checkable is that AlgoVoi appears on the A2A protocol partners page⁶ — a directory of roughly 150 organisations from AWS and Microsoft to individual startups, broad community membership rather than endorsement — and that its proposal to register a Compliance Gate extension in the A2A documentation⁷ was triaged by a maintainer.

A wallet, a vault, and an on-chain reality check

The consumer side is a free browser extension for Algorand and Voi that detects x402, MPP and AP2 payment challenges, presents them for approval and submits the signed transaction locally. Distribution is minimal: the Firefox listing⁸ shows one user and no reviews (v1.0.2³, April 2026), and the Chrome listing⁹ shows nine users and reads 'Item currently unavailable.' The extension's signature feature is the SpendingCap vault: a smart contract on Algorand mainnet (app 3487338609⁴) that holds ALGO, USDC and other ASAs and lets a local agent key auto-pay within on-chain-enforced per-payment and daily caps — no phone interaction after setup.

On-chain, the story is more measured. The deployed vault contract's global state shows zero payments processed (transaction count 0, total paid 0); the creator account is alive — roughly 33.5 ALGO, dozens of opted-in apps, small daily flows — but the vault itself has settled nothing yet.

Storefront to checkout link

For merchants the flow runs through hosted checkout (customer redirected to an AlgoVoi page, payable from Pera, Defly, Lute, MetaMask, Phantom and others) or the in-page extension path, with settlement confirmed by webhook plus API status check. Drop-in adapters cover WooCommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop and Shopware alongside native PHP, Python, Go and Rust SDKs; two demo stores¹⁰ are live with sub-dollar products and a checkout that lists every supported chain, Algorand USDC included. The quickstart is a five-minute loop: sign up, add a testnet payout address, POST /v1/payment-links, share the checkout URL, and confirm on-chain — about five seconds on Algorand — before a signed webhook event lands.

Pricing is a 60⁵-day free testnet trial, a lifetime $1,000⁶ mainnet allowance after KYC, then a flat 0.50%⁷ per confirmed payment (dropping to 0.40% and 0.30% at volume), with funds settling directly to the merchant's wallet — AlgoVoi takes no custody and holds no float. The self-hosted line is licensed per module, paid in USDC:

The adoption gap

The Agent Trust Bench — a free adversarial test suite of 193 x402 security profiles across 31 threat categories on eight chains, receive-only with a $1 USDC cap per call — is the public face of the security claims, and its own stats show who is actually using it: 3,262 sessions, dominated by the python-httpx user agent (10,721 requests) and automated probing, with only 65 sessions classified as automation by inter-event timing. It is a research instrument rather than a market. Open-substrate downloads are modest but real: the core canonicalisation package logged 959 downloads last month on PyPI and 436 on npm, while the policy-binding module saw 16.

The GitHub organisation¹¹ holds 116 public repositories and four stars in total, though it pushes daily. The project's own acquisition page is candid: 'The platform is pre-revenue: the build risk is retired and the applications are deployed and purchasable today.' Self-hosting means AlgoVoi never takes custody of funds — and equally that the buyer carries the operational and regulatory risk.

The bet

The pitch, in the end, is about provability: that an auditor in 2032 will recompute a signed receipt with two public libraries and no AlgoVoi software in the path. What is checkable is genuinely checkable — the canonicalisation discipline, the conformance corpus and the on-chain anchors all verify without trusting the operator, which is precisely the property AlgoVoi is selling. What cannot be verified is adoption; by the project's own figures it is pre-revenue, and the bench's traffic is mostly automated probes. Whether the market arrives to buy the proof is a question the numbers have not yet answered.

Source (22)

• algovoi.co.ukAlgoVoi
• docs.algovoi.co.ukAlgoVoi docs
• datatracker.ietf.orgdraft-hopley-x402-canonicalisation-jcs-v1 (IETF Datatracker)
• a2a-protocol.orgA2A Protocol partners
• github.comA2A Compliance Gate extension issue
• addons.mozilla.orgAlgoVoi on Firefox Add-ons
• chromewebstore.google.comAlgoVoi on Chrome Web Store
• woo.ilovechicken.co.ukAlgoVoi WooCommerce demo store
• github.comchopmob-cloud on GitHub
• find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.ukChristopher Hopley — Companies House appointments
• algovoi.co.ukPricing: perpetual licences, self hosted | AlgoVoi
• docs.algovoi.co.ukSubstrate Adopters Registry - AlgoVoi Platform
• algovoi.co.ukAgentic payment compliance: verifiable receipts | AlgoVoi
• algovoi.co.ukTrust and Security Center | AlgoVoi
• algovoi.co.ukAlgoVoi Wallet: multi-chain browser extension, x402 auto-pay
• datatracker.ietf.orgdraft-hopley-x402-canonicalisation-jcs-v1-04 - JCS Canonicalisation Discipline for Agentic-Payment Receipts
• docs.algovoi.co.uk
• docs.algovoi.co.uk
• docs.algovoi.co.uk
• docs.algovoi.co.uk
• docs.algovoi.co.uk
• docs.algovoi.co.uk