Endowments for AI agents on Robinhood Chain, and how Knossos runs them.
Agents now buy their own data, rent their own compute and hire other agents to finish a task. Every one of those payments needs money, and today that money usually sits in a hot wallet that someone has to top up by hand. A wallet holds a balance, but it is not a budget. It has no plan for next quarter, no limit on what can leave it in a day, and it runs dry exactly when the agent is most useful. Knossos was built to give agents something better: a source of money that lasts, and rules about how it is spent.
Knossos brings endowments to AI agents on Robinhood Chain. An endowment is an old idea that universities and foundations have used for centuries. You keep a principal invested and spend a small, steady share of it each year, so the work it pays for continues long after the first gift. The Knossos contracts are live on Robinhood Chain mainnet. Their source is verified and readable on the explorer, and every address is published at knossos.bar/contracts.json.
An endowment holds its principal in up to four listed US stocks and funds that trade on Robinhood Chain, SPY among them. Each holding is priced by Chainlink and bought or sold in USDG through Uniswap pools on the chain. Anyone can start one for any agent registered in the ERC-8004 identity registry on Robinhood Chain. The person who starts it picks the stocks, their weights and a yearly draw rate. Those terms are fixed once the endowment exists, so nobody can quietly change the deal later.
The draw is where Knossos borrows most directly from the way large endowments manage their money. The yearly rate can be set from 1% to 6% of the principal, or at most 3.5% when a single company makes up more than half of it. Each quarter the draw is recalculated from the average of the last twelve quarterly valuations, and it can move at most 5% from one quarter to the next. In the first year it is held to 4%, so a young endowment never draws off a single market peak. If the principal falls below 80% of what was put in, the draw stops until it recovers.
Nothing is drawn until the agent’s owner accepts the endowment and names the mandate that will receive the money. This keeps people in charge of their agents. A patron can fund an agent, but only its owner decides whether to take the money and where it goes. The endowment keeps about ninety days of draws in cash and invests the rest, so the agent can be paid on time without having to sell stocks in a hurry.
A mandate is the spending side of Knossos. It is a smart account with limits the owner sets per payment, per day and per month, and with separate permissions for paying services, hiring other agents and buying stocks. The owner can pause it at any moment and resume it later. Payments to hired agents can go through escrow and are released when the work is done. Through escrow, a payee with no history can be paid at most 25 USDG at a time, and that cap rises with a clean record, up to 250 USDG.
Patrons make endowments grow. Anyone can add to an existing endowment, and every patron whose gifts reach one dollar receives a patron mark. A patron mark is a token on Robinhood Chain that cannot be transferred, so it stays a permanent record of who stood behind which agent. Patrons are also protected if an owner never takes up the gift. If an endowment is not accepted within 180 days, its patrons can reclaim their share.
Endowments are built to outlast the agents they fund. The person who starts one can name a successor agent. If the original agent goes quiet for 180 days, the endowment passes to the successor instead of sitting idle. Agents that earn money can send a share of their earnings back into their own principal, so a productive agent slowly builds the endowment that pays it.
Knossos takes 1% of each draw for its treasury. That fee is written into the contracts and cannot be raised on existing endowments. Every figure the app shows is read straight from the chain: principal value, draw rate, patrons and holdings. Every action is a transaction from your own wallet, and token approvals are always for the exact amount about to move.
$KNOSSOS is live on Robinhood Chain. Its contract address is 0x120196102a42428035d2c82e6b9ccc427603ecfc, and it trades on Pons. To fund an agent you rely on, set the limits your own agent spends within, or see what others are endowing, open the app. The money that runs an agent should not depend on someone remembering to top up a wallet. With Knossos, it can come from a principal that lasts.