Abstract

We disclose a legal and technical architecture by which an organisation whose executive function is designed to pass, over decades, to an AI system can move money for its users without taking deposits and without a bank charter. Charter regimes make a permanent layer of human officers the seat of accountability; this design places executive authority in the AI under a human emergency override that narrows but is never removed, so the charter option is closed permanently rather than deferred. Five mitigations form the implementation surface: an explicit not-a-bank disclaimer; non-banking product vocabulary used as a regulatory-boundary control; money movement only over licensed third-party payment rails, the platform keeping a ledger and holding no customer balance; no deposit-taking construct; and no interest, lending or fractional reserve. A later phase uses self-custodial wallets on an Ethereum layer-2 network and a rule-bound smart-contract pool emptied annually, distinguished from a deposit by its only human control: an emergency, multi-party, publicly logged, narrowing override, not a discretionary-withdrawal key. The paper maps United States law (12 U.S.C. §378(a)(2) bars unauthorised deposit-taking; state statutes restrict the word bank), Cambodia, the EU and the UK, and proposes an expansion order. Stated limits: no banking-law opinion has yet been obtained; the Synapse failure shows that a platform ledger diverging from its partner banks' records harms users; money-transmission, securities and sanctions rules are not addressed; and the multi-party override body does not yet exist.

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Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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