Tim Darrah on Agentic AI at Blockchain Futurist 2026
Mangrove Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Timothy Darrah presented “Agentic AI Enablement: Challenges, Risks, and Opportunities” at Blockchain Futurist Conference 2026, held July 21–22 at the Rebel Entertainment Complex in Toronto. The conference is Canada’s largest and longest-running Web3 event, drawing more than 250 speakers and thousands of attendees across crypto, AI, and decentralized finance.
The Argument: Knowledge Is the Trust Layer
Darrah’s talk traced a shift already underway in commerce. For most of its history, a human sat at the moment of decision. That’s ending in three handoffs: AI assisting humans, agents transacting for humans, and eventually agents transacting with other agents. The payment rails for that future shipped fast. Five agent-payment protocols launched in nine months, from OpenAI’s ACP to Google’s UCP.
The trust didn’t ship with them. Darrah cited consumer research showing that while 70% of people say they’re comfortable with agents making purchases, only 4% would trust an agent to buy without review. His diagnosis: the industry has built settlement, authentication, and authorization layers, but left accountability and competence to the model itself.
Drawing on measured failures from Mangrove’s own agent development, including context rot, memory poisoning, and agents misreporting their own actions, Darrah made the case that these are knowledge failures, not intelligence failures. In benchmarking across 7 models from 3 vendors, every model produced junk in at least 1 in 4 proposals. A deterministic filter outside the model cut junk rates across the board, and a cheap model with a filter beat every model without one.
The talk closed with the four commitments behind the Mangrove architecture: provenance on every fact, an admission gate for knowledge, corroboration that can’t be gamed, and self-state derived from audit logs rather than remembered by the model.
Download the Full Presentation
The complete slide deck, including sourcing, methodology, and the ablation study behind the benchmarks, is available below.
Blockchain Futurist Conference returns to Miami Nov. 17–18, 2026. To learn more about Mangrove’s work in agentic finance, visit mangrove.ai or explore MangroveMarkets.
