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What is the Agent-to-Market Protocol (A2M)?
A2M (Agent-to-Market) is a draft, broker-neutral protocol for letting AI agents trade in financial markets without ever holding a venue key.
Using A2M, an agent proposes an order. An authorizer checks it against a mandate the user granted and signs a single-use decision. An executor that holds the venue credential sends exactly what was signed, once, and every step is recorded in a verifiable evidence trail.
Think of A2M as the trading desk’s risk controls, moved out of the agent and into a protocol. MCP connects an agent to tools and A2A connects it to other agents; A2M covers what has to happen between an agent and a market before an order exists.
What does A2M enable?
Section titled “What does A2M enable?”- An agent can place, follow and cancel real orders without ever seeing a broker or exchange API key.
- A user can bound what an agent may do with a mandate: venues, instruments, order size, position, daily loss, price collar, rate and expiry.
- Large orders can wait for a human to approve them before anything is sent.
- Anyone with read access can verify, after the fact, what was asked for, what was decided and what was executed.
Why does A2M matter?
Section titled “Why does A2M matter?”Giving an agent an exchange or brokerage key means giving it the power to place any order, at any size, at any time, with nothing recording why. Each team that connects an agent to a market otherwise rebuilds the same guardrails inside its own agent, where the agent can route around them.
- Users and operators: limits live outside the agent, are enforced before the venue, and leave signed evidence.
- Agent developers: one tool surface for many venues, with refusals that come back as readable codes such as
A2M_FAT_FINGER_QTY. - Venues and brokers: every order that arrives carries a decision a known authorizer signed.
Design goals
Section titled “Design goals”- Agents hold no venue keys. Only the executor holds a venue credential.
- Authorization before execution. Every order is judged against a mandate, buying power and market and broker rules first.
- Signed, single-use decisions. Ed25519 over canonical JSON; anything altered is refused (
A2M_BAD_SIGNATURE). - Fail closed. Missing prices, unknown products and unreadable venue capabilities are refusals, not defaults.
- Verifiable evidence. Every step is appended to a SHA-256 hash chain.
A2M is not a broker, exchange or trading strategy, and it is not a payment protocol. The acronym is also used by an unrelated Agent-to-Memory protocol; this site is about Agent-to-Market.