How to Set Your First Allow / Review / Block Policy

Your first production policy should be conservative, boring, and easy to explain. If the team cannot defend it in one sentence, it is probably too complicated for a pilot.

Wallet screening gets messy when teams try to optimize too early. They build a giant matrix of exceptions, scores, flags, and partial overrides before they have any real traffic to calibrate against.

The better approach is to launch with one simple policy and learn from it.

A Good First Policy

unknown / unscored                  -> allow
score under 25                     -> block
score 25-45                        -> review
score 46+ with decent confidence   -> allow
high_risk recommendation           -> block
flagged_for_review recommendation  -> review

This works because it does three useful things at once:

It avoids punishing first-time wallets too aggressively
It stops the obvious red zone immediately
It creates a review bucket you can learn from

Where Teams Usually Go Wrong

The biggest mistake is turning the review bucket into another kind of block without admitting it. If every review case gets silently rejected, you lose the main benefit of piloting conservatively.

The second mistake is trying to make the threshold feel mathematically perfect before there is enough traffic to justify that confidence.

How To Roll It Out

Phase 1: headers or logs only
Phase 2: block only the under-25 wallets and explicit high-risk calls
Phase 3: review the middle band weekly and adjust only if the misses are obvious

That is enough to get a real signal without turning the first integration into a policy science project.

What To Measure

The first questions are simple:

How many wallets landed in each bucket?
Which review cases would you actually have allowed?
Did any blocked wallet look obviously legitimate?
Did any allowed wallet later look like a miss?

Those answers tell you whether the threshold should move. Not vibes. Not category theory. Real workflow outcomes.

Start with the conservative pilot policy and tune it with traffic.

Read The x402 Guide

A good first screening policy is intentionally simple. You can always get more sophisticated later. The first job is to be safe, understandable, and easy to tune.