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Conto scores each payee from its payment history and shared network signals. Policies and reviewers use the score to decide whether an agent can pay that address.

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Use the right signal

Recipient names, purposes, and categories supplied by your agent are caller-provided context, not independent evidence. Do not treat them as verified identity. Trust enrichment can use cached data. An unavailable enrichment source does not establish that the recipient is trusted. When the trust score or level a rule needs is missing, the payment is denied, whatever the rule’s action. A baseline score can still exist for a recipient with little history, so inspect the evidence and confidence as well. Card payments never carry a trust score or trust level. On a card payment, DENY and REQUIRE_APPROVAL rules of type TRUST_SCORE or COUNTERPARTY_STATUS are skipped, but an ALLOW rule of either type denies the payment. To keep card payments working, write trust rules as DENY rules, such as deny below 0.5 rather than allow at 0.5 and above. Or put ALLOW trust rules in a policy assigned only to wallets, since organization policies and policies assigned to an agent or card also run on card payments.

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Two layers of trust

  • Per-organization trust: your organization’s view of a counterparty, based on your own transaction history with it.
  • Network trust: a cross-organization view of a counterparty across all Conto customers.
TRUST_SCORE rules read the network score. COUNTERPARTY_STATUS rules read your organization’s trust level for the payee.

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The counterparty assessment

Conto combines both trust layers, your review state, and any policy or compliance gates into one counterparty assessment. It answers five separate questions:
  1. Trust: how much positive evidence supports paying this counterparty. The assessment shows your organization’s score as 0 to 100, where high is good. TRUST_SCORE rules do not read this number. When there is not enough evidence to score, trust reads as Not scored, not a made-up middle number. A brand-new payee is unscored, not low trust.
  2. Risk: which adverse signals create risk. This is a category, not one minus trust. When evidence is insufficient, risk stays Risk unknown. Conto does not turn “no history” into “high risk”.
  3. Confidence: how much data backs the assessment, independent of trust and risk. A high-trust counterparty with only a few payments is still low confidence.
  4. Hard stops: independent policy, compliance, identity, or operational gates. A hard stop such as a sanctions hit or a network-wide block stops release on its own, without inflating the risk score. A counterparty can be low risk and still hard-stopped.
  5. Recommended vs enforced action: Conto shows what it recommends (block, review, approve with controls, or automate) next to what your policies enforce today (block, require approval, or allow). When policy is looser than the recommendation, the assessment flags the gap. Review the counterparty controls before relying on automation.
Operators can open the assessment from the Trust tab on any counterparty.

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Evidence behind the trust score

The counterparty detail response and dashboard show the evidence behind an assessment:
  • payment count and confirmed payment volume
  • successful-settlement rate
  • failed and policy-flagged payment counts
  • relationship age and time since last activity
  • your team’s verification state
  • whether shared network evidence is available
The assessment also groups evidence into payment history, reliability, activity, and verification, with strength labels and recommended actions. 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

Policies and payment checks read three separate values: Conto calculates your organization’s score from 0.0 to 1.0 and maps it to a trust level. The assessment shows the same score as 0 to 100.

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Lifecycle statuses

Trust level is an evidence signal. Lifecycle status is the operator control state that Conto stores on each counterparty and maps back into policy-compatible fields. Counterparty APIs return lifecycleStatus together with the matching trustLevel and approvalStatus. Use MONITORED for a payee you have approved but still want a person to review each payment to. Once a payee is APPROVED, TRUSTED, MONITORED, QUARANTINED, or BLOCKED, its trust level stays the value in this table. Rescoring after a payment updates only the score.

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External enrichment and compliance signals

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Conto network intelligence

Conto aggregates anonymized risk signals across organizations to improve counterparty evaluation. Addresses that several organizations flag or block raise alerts and lower the network score. The Network page in the dashboard shows entity details, trust lookups, alerts, and network-wide totals.

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Fairscale for Solana

For Solana addresses with no existing network trust score, Conto can enrich the counterparty with Fairscale wallet reputation data. Fairscale scores onchain behavior, token holdings, transaction patterns, staking activity, and social connections from 0 to 100.
  • Used for cold-start reputation on Solana
  • Normalized into Conto’s 0.0 - 1.0 trust scale and used as the network score that TRUST_SCORE rules read
  • Reputation enrichment supplements the trust information already available for the address
  • Skipped for EVM addresses, and when no enrichment result is available

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Sanctions screening

Sanctions and compliance checks are separate from trust scoring. Conto screens wallet addresses against sanctions lists on every payment, including known sanctioned addresses such as Tornado Cash, Lazarus Group, and Garantex. Screening can block a payment independently of the trust score, so a counterparty can be high-trust from a behavior standpoint and still be blocked for compliance reasons. Chainalysis or TRM Labs can replace the local list. Contact support@conto.finance about either.
Sanctions screening fails closed. If the selected provider is unavailable, or the local OFAC list has not refreshed recently, the payment is denied.
Conto also blocks OFAC-sanctioned countries whenever the payment request includes context.recipientCountry. To allow only the countries you permit, see geographic restrictions.
Always consult legal counsel for compliance requirements. This is not legal advice.

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How trust becomes a control

Trust data feeds into policy evaluation. Common trust-aware controls:
  • TRUST_SCORE thresholds
  • Counterparty status and trust-level rules
  • New-recipient approval workflows
  • Alerts when trust drops sharply
See counterparty policies.

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Look up trust programmatically

Use the SDK network trust endpoint to inspect any wallet address:
The response includes trust.globalScore (0 to 1), isVerified, riskLevel, networkRelationships, riskSignalCount, your agent’s relationship with the address, and your transaction history with it. Standard SDK keys include the required network:read scope.

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Network sharing modes

Choose how your organization participates in network intelligence in Settings. If sharing is disabled, network lookups return an UNKNOWN baseline score of 0.5 for every address, so a TRUST_SCORE rule compares every payee against 0.5.

Approval workflows

Use trust levels as a review trigger

Recommended policy setup

Build a layered risk model for agents that spend

Recipes

Copy-paste trust lookup and policy setup commands