Seneschal
Agentic system to manage cross-border payments
When Stripe launched Tempo.xyz and ACP, I felt excited about the promise for business owners managing international supply-chains, and so I wanted to see if I could build something to help them realise that potential.
I tried to define the problem as "automated cross-border card payments get declined constantly because programmatic purchasing patterns look suspicious". And envisioned an agent (or seneschal) that could be trusted to monitor prices, make payments, and handle the complexities of international trade on behalf of the business.
I built a webhook that receives a restock signal, looks up the SKU and supplier, runs it through a Zod-validated YAML spend policy engine, and initiates a stablecoin transfer on Tempo moderato testnet. The transfer settles in ~5 seconds. Every step is written to an append-only audit log. Transactions that hit policy edges get held and surfaced to an operator dashboard where they can be approved or rejected in one click.
The operator dashboard surfaces wallet balance, transaction history with on-chain tx hashes and settlement times, a live exceptions queue, and a supplier list. Auth runs on custom JWT sessions. The data model covers operators, suppliers, SKUs, transactions, exceptions, and audit logs.
Talking to people with experience running a business with international supply-chains made it clear that the technology is largely tractable, but supplier crypto adoption, operator trust with agent-held wallets, and regulatory exposure are coordination problems a solo prototype cannot de-risk. I think this is a really interesting space, but I need to come back with a different problem in mind.