Mandate

In plainer words

A mandate is the boundary within which an agent may spend. It usually has four parts: the most it can spend in one payment, the most per day, which addresses it may pay (an allowlist), and what purpose is allowed. Think of it as an allowance's rules — but for an agent. The key: these rules must be enforced by a system outside the agent. A limit written only into the agent's prompt isn't a real mandate, because an agent's "mind" can be poisoned by text and talked into going around it (see "prompt injection"). Letting an agent enforce its own limit is letting a possibly-hijacked guard watch itself. Before every settlement, OceanAlt's gateway checks the mandate line by line: over the cap? Blocked. Paying an off-allowlist address? Blocked. Purpose doesn't match? Blocked. It also compares this payment's intent against the original mandate — even if the agent insists "this is fine," a mismatch doesn't pass. In one line: a mandate turns "how much, to whom" from a sentence in a prompt into a hard constraint the money can't get past.