The problem VCR Protocol solves

VCR Protocol (Verifiable Capability Routing) is the missing policy layer for autonomous AI agent payments sitting at the intersection of ERC-8004 agent identity, ENSIP-25 naming, and x402 HTTP-native payment rails. While existing standards give agents an on-chain identity and the ability to transact, nothing stops them from spending without boundaries; VCR fixes this by letting agent owners define verifiable JSON spending policies (capping transaction amounts, daily limits, allowed tokens, recipient whitelists, chain restrictions, and time windows) that are pinned to IPFS and resolved through ENS. Every payment attempt runs through a 9-step canAgentSpend() verification from ENS lookup and IPFS policy fetch all the way through expiry, amount, recipient, token, chain, and daily-limit checks before a single wei moves. Built on Express 5, React 19, Solidity, BitGo multisig wallets, and Pinata IPFS, with 69 passing unit tests and a live deployment on Sepolia, VCR gives the agentic economy what it's been missing: cryptographically grounded, human-defined guardrails over how AI agents spend money.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we faced into:

BitGo wallet flow parity (Terminal vs UI): aligning backend API calls with SDK behavior, especially passphrase handling and runtime env differences.
Sepolia ENS integration: fixing ENS app navigation + ensuring all ENS links/records consistently target Sepolia.
Owner-signed policy updates: implementing secure signature verification so only owner/creator can publish policy changes.
Policy update propagation: making each policy edit generate a new IPFS CID, persist it, and sync ENS pointers correctly.
Policy vs Rules separation: resolving confusion between enforceable policy data and human-readable dDoc snapshots.
dDoc auto-refresh on policy change: ensuring “View dDoc” reflects latest policy version instead of stale CID content.
Document version history system: building full CID history (save, browse, view, restore) end-to-end with Mongo + IPFS.
Legacy compatibility/data migration: handling CID-to-document lookup and schema/index issues for older records.
TypeScript drift fixes: resolving server compile breaks from mismatched fields in incident/demo typing.