A practical definition for builders and researchers
An agent wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet purpose-built for AI agents—software systems that operate autonomously or semi-autonomously—to hold, receive, and spend digital assets without a human manually approving each transaction. Unlike conventional wallets designed for individual human users, agent wallets are engineered for programmatic access, policy enforcement, and automated execution. They address the fundamental problem of how to give an AI agent financial agency while maintaining security over private keys and setting boundaries on what the agent can do.
Agent wallets rely on three primary technical approaches to balance automation with security. The first is multi-party computation (MPC), which splits a private key into multiple shards distributed across different parties or servers. No single party ever holds the complete key, yet they can jointly sign transactions. This allows an agent to initiate a payment while a separate service or threshold of parties participates in authorization, reducing single points of failure.
The second approach is smart accounts (also called account abstraction or smart contract wallets). These are onchain programmable accounts where rules are encoded directly into the account logic. A human user can delegate specific permissions to an agent—such as spending limits, allowed counterparties, or time windows—without sharing the underlying private key. The agent operates within these scoped constraints, and the smart contract enforces them onchain.
The third approach is custodial APIs, where a service provider manages the private keys and exposes API endpoints for the agent to request transactions. The provider handles key storage, signing, and often compliance checks. This is the simplest to integrate but places trust in the custodian. Many agent wallet implementations combine elements of these approaches, and the choice depends on factors including security requirements, regulatory constraints, and the need for decentralization.
The following entries from the agentwallet.md directory illustrate the range of approaches and use cases in the agent wallet space: