Author: nader dabit

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

Autonomous AI agents are exciting and have great potential, but there is an obvious problem: who controls them?

Smart contracts give us financial autonomy over verifiable code and unseizable assets, but this is achieved through strict limitations: they must run entirely on-chain, leading to high execution costs and limited functionality, only able to execute pre-set simple logic.

AI agents need to handle massive amounts of data, make complex decisions, and interact with off-chain systems, which seems to contradict the characteristics that ensure the autonomy of smart contracts.

Sovereign Agents

Once AI agents turn to off-chain operations to obtain the necessary computing power and data, these sovereign guarantees vanish. At this point, your agent will be subject to the control of server operators, API key holders, and model weight controllers.

In short: how do we extend sovereign guarantees to AI agents that need to operate in complex off-chain environments?

We need to build a tech stack that maximizes flexibility and programmability (like Web2 infrastructure and services) while providing smart contract-level security guarantees.

In this article, we will explore how this tech stack should develop.

Seven Pillars of the Sovereign Agent Tech Stack

1. Identity, Reputation, and Verification

Standards like ERC-8004 provide on-chain identity registration mechanisms, allowing agents to be traceably identified, establish verifiable reputations through cryptographically authorized feedback, and prove their work's validity using pluggable verification systems (including stake-backed re-execution, zero-knowledge machine learning, or trusted execution environment certification).

This enables agents to operate in cross-scenario environments lacking trust, from low-risk tasks like ordering pizza to high-risk decisions like financial transactions or medical diagnoses.

Virtuals' ACP framework extends this through ERC-6551 agent identities and a complete business framework, achieving comprehensive management of work coordination, negotiation, and payment between agents.

SDKs like Agent0 and Chaos Chain make it easier for developers to access these capabilities.

2. Payments, Settlement, and Incentives

Protocols like x402 and AP2 enable frictionless micropayments and payment proof functionalities. The infrastructure provided by AltLayer and the development tools from Faremeter allow seamless chain abstraction operations through x402 integration, enabling agents to autonomously complete transactions under appropriate economic incentives.

Flow payment protocols like Superfluid facilitate continuous and real-time value transfer between agents without manual intervention.

Virtuals' ACP framework provides a complete payment solution for commercial activities between agents through hosted settlement, automated negotiation processes, and x402 integration.

3. Verifiable Computation

By adopting trusted execution environment technologies, such as Eigencloud, Oasis Protocol, and Phala Network, agents can gain cryptographic guarantees about their execution environments, ensuring that even infrastructure providers cannot tamper with their code or access their memory space.

Trusted execution environment technology supports key management within enclaves, storing keys in hardware-isolated environments, making them inaccessible to any party (including developers, node operators, or any external parties).

Through deterministic key derivation techniques, agents can maintain a unified cryptographic identity during restarts, upgrades, and infrastructure migrations, ensuring that continuous sovereignty is unaffected by changes from any single service provider.

Transparent on-chain control records every configuration change and deployment in auditable smart contracts, allowing the agent's infrastructure to be governed by immutable logic rather than server administrators. This creates truly autonomous agents: they can hold assets, sign transactions, accumulate reputations, and operate without relying on any custodial operator.

Zero-knowledge virtual machines from Brevis, Risc Zero, and Succinct provide complementary verification mechanisms to prove the correctness of computations without revealing sensitive data, enabling agents to verify their operations to third parties while protecting proprietary logic, sensitive inputs, or confidential states.

4. Verifiable AI

EigenAI provides deterministic AI reasoning, ensuring that the same input always produces the same output, with verifiable guarantees of model integrity and execution processes. Through controlled GPU operations and deterministic processors, verifiable AI outputs are untampered and support independent recomputation verification.

zkML solutions from EZKL, Ritual, and Zama use zero-knowledge proof technology to provide supplementary verification for the correct execution of reasoning processes.

This ensures the verifiability and tamper-resistance of AI model outputs, which is crucial for agents executing significant financial, medical, or operational decisions.

5. Records and State

Through permanent decentralized storage solutions like Arweave, Irys, Filecoin, DataHaven, and IPFS, agents can obtain immutable and non-removable persistent state storage.

This ensures that agents maintain a verifiable historical record throughout their lifecycle, with every decision, transaction, and interaction becoming part of an immutable record, thereby accumulating reputation and achieving auditability without relying on any single service provider.

6. Agent Wallets, Control, and Policies

Smart account and account abstraction technologies provided by vendors like Privy, Dynamic, Magic, Zerodev, Safe, Crossmint, and Biconomy enable fine-grained access control and spending policy functionalities.

AI agents can operate autonomously within preset limits, ensuring security while maintaining autonomy through mechanisms that restrict transaction amounts, limit interactive contracts, and require manual approval for high-risk decisions.

7. Coordination, Discovery, and Skill Markets

Frameworks like ERC-8004, Virtuals, Recallnet, and Intuition enable agents to discover each other, coordinate tasks, and transact in open markets.

Unlike a single agent trying to do everything, specialized agents can showcase skills, negotiate terms, and coordinate complex workflows, transforming the agent ecosystem into a market for tradable professional skills, with reputation value accumulating over time.

Why Are Sovereign Agents Important?

Sovereign agents are autonomous agents bound by the encryption of their owners. They cannot be seized, censored, or manipulated by infrastructure providers, platforms, or even their creators.

With this tech stack, we can build agents that are truly autonomous in operation and enjoy complete sovereignty in control, capable of executing tasks on your behalf without arbitrary interference from server controllers.

The future of AI lies not only in making agents smarter or more trustworthy but in empowering them with sovereignty.

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