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Trust Scoring and Counterparty Controls

Trust scoring is how Conto turns recipient history, verification, and network intelligence into a practical control surface for agent payments. It helps answer a simple question before money moves:
How comfortable should this agent be paying this address right now?

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What Feeds the Trust Score

Conto calculates trust with four weighted components:
ComponentWeightWhat it reflects
History30%Transaction count, volume, and relationship depth
Reliability30%Success rate, failed transactions, flagged activity
Activity20%Account age, recency, and consistency of behavior
Verification20%Manual verification, network data, and external enrichment
This means trust is not based on a single signal. A new counterparty can improve over time through successful activity, while a once-safe counterparty can degrade if failure or alert signals appear.

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How Trust Levels Are Assigned

Internally, Conto calculates a score on a 0.0 to 1.0 scale and then maps it to a trust level.
Internal scoreTrust levelNotes
< 0.2UNKNOWN or BLOCKEDCounterparties with low scores only become BLOCKED when there are actual negative signals, such as failed or flagged transactions
0.2 - 0.49UNKNOWNLimited history or weak signal quality
0.5 - 0.74VERIFIEDReasonable confidence, but not yet a fully trusted recipient
>= 0.75TRUSTEDHigh-confidence recipient, assuming verification requirements are satisfied
Low data is not the same as malicious behavior. Conto treats many new counterparties as UNKNOWN rather than auto-blocking them.

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External Enrichment and Compliance Signals

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Conto Network Intelligence

Conto aggregates anonymized network signals across organizations to improve counterparty evaluation. This data takes precedence when it exists because it reflects real payment behavior on the platform.

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Fairscale for Solana

For Solana addresses with no existing network trust score, Conto can enrich the counterparty with Fairscale data.
  • Used for cold-start reputation on Solana
  • Normalized into Conto’s 0.0 - 1.0 trust scale
  • Fail-open design: enrichment helps, but provider unavailability does not automatically block

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Sanctions Screening

Sanctions and compliance checks are separate from trust scoring.
  • Local OFAC screening is built in
  • Chainalysis and TRM Labs can be layered on for enterprise use
  • Compliance checks are fail-closed for enterprise screening providers
That means a counterparty can be high-trust from a behavior standpoint and still be blocked for compliance reasons.

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How Trust Becomes a Control

Trust data feeds directly into policy evaluation. Common trust-aware controls include:
  • TRUST_SCORE thresholds
  • Counterparty status and trust-level rules
  • New-recipient approval workflows
  • Auto-freeze and alert thresholds when trust drops sharply
For more on provider inputs, see /integrations/trust-providers. For policy rule details, see /policies/counterparties.

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Canonical Patterns

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1. New vendor safe path

  • Unknown counterparties are allowed to exist but not to spend freely.
  • Require approval for first payments or low-trust recipients.
  • Promote to normal flow once transaction history and verification improve.

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2. Trusted vendor fast path

  • Allow trusted or verified counterparties to pass with fewer interruptions.
  • Keep hard denies for sanctioned or blocked recipients.
  • Layer spend limits and time windows on top of trust so no single signal has too much power.

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3. Solana cold-start enrichment

  • Use Fairscale when a Solana recipient has no Conto network history.
  • Combine that score with a conservative approval threshold.
  • Let the relationship graduate as real transaction history builds.

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4. Trust deterioration response

  • Watch for trust score drops, repeated failures, or new flags.
  • Route affected counterparties into approval workflows.
  • Use alerts or auto-freeze when trust degradation becomes severe.

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Look Up Trust Programmatically

Use the SDK network trust endpoint to inspect any wallet address: 
curl https://conto.finance/api/sdk/network/trust/0x742d35Cc6634C0532925a3b844Bc9e7595f2bD18 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CONTO_SDK_KEY"
The response includes:
  • Global trust information
  • Agent-specific relationship trust, when it exists
  • Flags and risk indicators
  • Aggregate transaction history
This is a useful building block for preflight checks, ops tooling, or AI assistant workflows.

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Trust, Approvals, and Policy Design

Trust scoring works best as part of a layered model:
  1. Use trust to classify recipients.
  2. Use approvals to review the gray area.
  3. Use hard policy denies for clearly forbidden destinations.
That gives you three lanes instead of one:
  • Fast lane for trusted counterparties
  • Review lane for unknown or changing counterparties
  • Blocked lane for clearly disallowed behavior

Trust Providers

See Fairscale, sanctions screening, and provider priority

Approval Workflows

Use trust levels as a review trigger

Securing Agents

Build a layered risk model for agents that spend

Recipes

Copy-paste trust lookup and policy setup commands