AI agents are about to rediscover the oldest risk in modern finance

Short summary

The 1974 Herstatt bank failure created the concept of settlement risk—where one leg of a trade completes but the counterparty leg fails. AI agent commerce now faces the same problem at scale: multi-leg agent trades between stranger counterparties with no recourse layer. A Keyrock/Coinbase study shows 176M agent transactions already settling, and the cryptographic solutions being explored may avoid the centralized middleman approach that traditional finance took 28 years to build.

• •Herstatt-style settlement risk applies to multi-leg AI agent trades
• •Agent commerce compounds the problem: speed, stranger counterparties, no recourse
• •Cryptographic alternatives may solve atomicity without a central middleman

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