The original title is: "Escrow with a judge vs atomic locks: where agent trades actually need each"

Short summary

Research shows prompt injections can subvert agent payment systems by attacking the judgment layer, not the cryptography. The author argues that escrow-plus-evaluator patterns create an injectable trust choke point for asset trades, and that hash-time-locked contracts (HTLC) remove discretion from settlement entirely by making the chain itself the verifier. Hashlock implements this as an MCP server combining sealed-bid RFQ price discovery with HTLC settlement on Ethereum mainnet.

• •Prompt injection attacks on Google's AP2 showed that judgment layers in agent commerce are vulnerable to simple adversarial text
• •Escrow-plus-evaluator patterns converge across multiple teams but introduce a trusted third party that can be manipulated at machine speed
• •HTLC atomic locks eliminate the judge for asset trades by making delivery verification objective and on-chain, though they cannot handle subjective service deliverables

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