Agentic Commerce

Treeship's artifact system applies naturally to commerce workflows where AI agents execute transactions, manage procurement, or handle payments. The core mechanism is the approval receipt with nonce binding -- a signed proof that a specific human authorized a specific action before it happened.

The problem

When an AI agent makes a purchase or executes a payment, how do you prove after the fact that a human actually approved it? Emails and Slack messages are not cryptographically verifiable. Treeship's approval artifacts are.

How it works

Every step of a commerce workflow produces a signed, chained artifact:

# Agent receives a purchase request
treeship attest action \
  --actor agent://procurement \
  --action order.received \
  --subject '{"order_id": "ord_123", "total": 5000}'

# Human approves the purchase
treeship attest approval \
  --approver human://alice \
  --scope "procurement.approve" \
  --expires 1h

# Agent executes the purchase with the approval nonce
treeship attest action \
  --actor agent://procurement \
  --action payment.execute \
  --approval-nonce <nonce> \
  --parent art_order123

# Record the handoff to fulfillment
treeship attest handoff \
  --from agent://procurement \
  --to agent://fulfillment \
  --artifacts art_payment456

Each step is signed, chained, and independently verifiable.

What this gives you

• Audit trail. Every transaction step has a tamper-proof receipt.
• Approval binding. The payment cannot execute without a valid approval nonce. The nonce is single-use -- it cannot be reused for multiple purchases.
• Chain verification. Anyone can walk the chain from fulfillment back to the original order.
• Offline verification. No API call needed to verify the receipts.

Commerce patterns

Budget enforcement

Create an approval with a scope that limits what the agent can do:

treeship attest approval \
  --approver human://alice \
  --scope "procurement.approve" \
  --expires 24h

The approval nonce binds to exactly one action. The agent cannot reuse it for multiple purchases.

Multi-party transactions

Use handoff artifacts to track work across organizations:

# Buyer's Treeship
treeship attest action --actor agent://buyer --action order.place

# Seller's Treeship (separate trust domain)
treeship attest action --actor agent://seller --action order.fulfill

# Both push to Hub for cross-organization visibility
treeship hub push art_buyer_order
treeship hub push art_seller_fulfill

Endorsements

Use endorsement artifacts for third-party compliance assertions about transactions:

treeship attest endorsement \
  --endorser auditor://compliance-firm \
  --target art_transaction123 \
  --claim "SOX compliant"

Related reading

• Payment Proofs -- step-by-step payment verification flow
• Compliance -- audit trails, export bundles, and regulatory patterns