Terminology:
- Principals: A principal is a KYC verified individual or KYB verified business/institution. It owns a Tythe Account and is underwritten for a Tythe Credit Rating and a Credit Limit. It is the customer and the borrower of record.
- Agents: An agent is a program with an ERC-8004 identity and a signing key. It is bound to one principal and acts under one mandate at a time. It is underwritten for a Tythe Conduct Rating and Financial Scope. It is never a customer.
- Account: The account is a smart contract on Base, deployed by Tythe and owned by the principal’s key. Tythe holds no keys and no funds. The principal can always withdraw its idle balance. The balance is divided in three.
1. Liened, pledged as Coverage for open Loans. Not withdrawable while a Loan is open. Consumed only by the loss waterfall.
2. Reserved, held for the remaining period budget of live mandates. Not withdrawable, not lendable.
3. Idle, the rest.idle = balance - liened - reserved
Every movement out of the account passes Tythe’s mandate check. The owner may move any unliened balance. An agent may move only what its mandate allows. - Mandates: A mandate is a bounded, expiring, revocable grant of authority from a principal to an agent. It is stored on-chain and signed as a Delegation Instrument.
A mandate has a fixed set of fields: budget per rolling period, maximum per transaction, counterparties, permitted rails, credit share, earn authority, expiry, and an escalation threshold. Each numeric field has two values.
1. Ceiling, set by the operator. The most the principal is willing to grant.
2. Effective, set by the intelligence layer from the agent’s standing. At or below the ceiling. The agent operates at the effective value.
A sub-agent’s mandate is a strict subset of its parent’s effective scope and shares the parent’s budget. Authority narrows down the chain and never widens. - Intelligence: Three engines run off-chain.
1. Principal underwriting, produces the Credit Rating and Credit Limit from on-chain history, activity on Tythe, and consented bank data.
2. Agent underwriting, reads every action receipt and produces an agent Conduct Rating and Financial Scope. Standing rises with clean conduct and falls on anomalies. A sanctions hit or a run of rejected actions revokes the mandate.
3. Venue intelligence, publishes per-venue signals, indices, the allowlist, and reference weights.
Engine outputs reach the chain only as signed attestations. The chain enforces registered bounds: a Rating, Limit, or Scope cannot exceed its cap, an effective value cannot exceed its ceiling, and no attestation can move a value by more than a registered step.
The process:
Tythe has four parts. The account holds a principal’s funds. The mandate bounds what an agent may do with them. The credit market lends against underwritten limits. The intelligence layer underwrites principals and agents and publishes venue information.1
Get verified and underwritten
An individual entity completes KYC, or a business/ an institutional entity completes KYB, through Tythe’s verification provider. Tythe deploys the principal’s own smart-contract account on Base at a deterministic address; the principal’s key owns it. The Principal Underwriting Engine reads the principal’s on-chain history, its activity on Tythe over time, and, with consent, its bank data, and produces a Credit Rating and a Credit Limit. Those outcomes reach the chain as signed, bounded attestations.
2
Delegate and bind agents
The principal registers each agent it will delegate to. An agent is an ERC-8004 identity plus a signing key. Binding takes two signatures, the principal’s operator and the agent’s key, over an Agent Authorization, a signed instrument in which the principal appoints the agent as its agent and accepts responsibility for what it does under any mandate.
3
Write mandates
A mandate is a bounded grant of authority: a budget per rolling period, counterparties, a maximum per transaction, permitted rails, a share of the principal’s credit, earn authority, an expiry, and an escalation threshold. Every field has a ceiling the operator sets and an effective value the Intelligence Layer sets inside it. A new agent starts conservatively. The mandate is recorded on-chain and rendered as a Delegation Instrument the operator signs.
4
Agents act
An agent submits an action, a payment, a venue deposit, a credit draw. Tythe’s mandate check runs inside the principal’s own account: is this agent bound, is the mandate live, does the action fit every field at its effective value. Only then does the account execute, on x402, to a venue, or into the credit market. Actions above the escalation threshold wait for an operator’s approval on-chain and fail closed if none comes.
5
Compounding intelligence
Every action produces a receipt. The Agent Engine reads the stream, maintains the agent’s Conduct Rating, and moves its effective Financial Scope up on sustained clean conduct and down on anomalies, never above the ceiling and never in one jump. A sanctions hit or a pattern of rejected actions revokes the mandate immediately. Repayment history feeds the principal’s next rating.
6
Secure a line of credit
An agent with credit share, or the principal directly, draws a Loan: fixed rate, fixed term, terms set from the Rating band. At origination the principal grants a lien over a portion of its own balance as Coverage; the rest stays free. Capture routes revenue-tagged inflows to the repayment schedule. If a Loan defaults, the loss waterfall is strict and atomic: captured revenue, the lien, legal recourse, Tythe’s first-loss reserve, and only then lenders.
7
Earn on idle capital
The principal, or an agent with earn authority, supplies idle balance to the credit market and holds shares, or deposits into curated venues on Base. Tythe publishes venue signals, indices, and reference weights as information. Every allocation is the principal’s or its agent’s instruction; Tythe never moves funds on its own initiative.