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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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Two Layers of Trust

Conto maintains two complementary trust scoring layers:
  • Per-organization trust: your org’s local view of a counterparty based on your own transaction history with them.
  • Network trust: a cross-organization view of a counterparty across all Conto customers, treating signals like a credit bureau.
Policies can use either layer. The per-org score is most relevant for repeat counterparties; the network score is most useful for cold-start decisions on addresses you have not transacted with before.

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The Counterparty Assessment

Conto combines those trust layers, your review state, and any policy or compliance gates into one counterparty assessment. It keeps five questions separate on purpose, so an operator sees not just a number but what it means and what to do next.
  1. Trust: how much positive evidence supports paying this counterparty. High is good, on a 0 to 100 scale. 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, that gap is called out so you can review the counterparty controls before relying on automation.
Insufficient evidence is not risk. A payee with no history reads as Not scored trust and Risk unknown, never a low score or a high risk. Evidence has to be present before it can move either number.
Operators can open the assessment from the Trust tab on any counterparty, and it is available programmatically at GET /api/counterparties/{id}/assessment.

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Evidence Behind the Trust Score

The counterparty detail response and dashboard show the evidence customers need to understand and reconcile 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 clear 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

Conto calculates a score on a 0.0 to 1.0 scale and maps it to a trust level.
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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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. SDK and dashboard counterparty APIs expose the canonical lifecycleStatus while continuing to return trustLevel and approvalStatus for existing policy rules.

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External Enrichment and Compliance Signals

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Conto Network Intelligence

Conto aggregates shared network signals across organizations to improve counterparty evaluation. Operators can now inspect that network layer directly in the dashboard, not just infer it from a policy result. The Network workspace exposes detailed entity views, trust lookups, alert context, and network-wide strength summaries so teams can see why an address is unknown, verified, trusted, or blocked.

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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
  • Reputation enrichment supplements the trust information already available for the address

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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 screening can block a payment independently of the trust score
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
  • Alerts 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 and human review when trust degradation becomes severe.

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Look Up Trust Programmatically

Use the SDK network trust endpoint to inspect any wallet address:
The response includes:
  • Normalized global trust score and confidence
  • Exact shared payment, settlement, organization, volume, flag, and block counts
  • Your organization’s payment contribution and local flag or block state
  • Customer-readable signals and local relationship context
For Solana addresses, Conto can use connected reputation sources when calculating the normalized trust result. The response presents the resulting score, verification state, risk level, active risk-signal count, relationship summary, and aggregate transaction history. This is a useful building block for preflight checks, payment review, or AI assistant workflows.

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What Operators Can Inspect

The Network dashboard is meant to answer two different questions:
  1. What does the network know about this address right now?
  2. How much shared intelligence is my organization currently participating in?
In practice, operators can inspect:
  • detailed entity lists ranked by transaction volume and trust level
  • first-seen and last-seen timing for known entities
  • network-wide transaction counts, participating organizations, and tracked volume
  • your organization’s own contribution to a known entity, including local flags or block signals
  • trust lookups for EVM addresses, Solana addresses, and supported domains
This makes trust scoring easier to operationalize during recipient review, approval triage, and post-incident investigation.

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Network Sharing Modes

Organizations can control how they participate in network intelligence from Settings. If sharing is disabled, network lookups degrade gracefully: Conto returns an UNKNOWN baseline and explains that shared trust signals are paused until the organization re-enables network intelligence.

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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 network intelligence

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