Destination allowlist

The set of recipients an agent is permitted to pay, cryptographically committed into the covenant.

A destination allowlist restricts which recipient addresses an agent may pay. If a vault has an allowlist configured, the covenant rejects any agent spend to a recipient not on that list — there is no way to pay an unlisted address using that agent's authority, regardless of amount or remaining budget.

#How it is enforced

The allowlist is not a database check the server performs and then trusts — it is committed cryptographically (as a Merkle tree, so the list can be large without bloating every transaction) into the covenant itself. A spend transaction must include a proof that its recipient is a member of the committed set; the covenant verifies that proof as part of accepting the transaction. This means the allowlist holds even against an agent that skips the PolicyVault app and hand-builds a transaction directly.

#Per-agent

In covenant versions supporting multiple independent agents, each agent can have its own recipient set — one agent's allowlist has no bearing on another's.

#Changing the allowlist

Adding or removing allowed recipients is an owner-signed covenant operation (an owner may need to reconstruct and re-commit the allowlist's Merkle root). It is not something an agent or approver can do, and it is not something that can be changed by editing PolicyVault's application metadata.

#No allowlist configured

A vault (or an individual agent) is not required to have a destination allowlist. Without one, an agent may pay any valid recipient, still subject to its per-transaction limit, periodic budget, and any approval threshold.

See also: Create an allowlist, Destination not allowed.