Three complementary papers — the protocol standard, a strategic framework, and the technical design. All address the same question from different angles: how does trust work in the agent economy?
A Verification Standard for Autonomous Software Agents
For developers, researchers & protocol designersThe foundational protocol document and its companion technical specification. Together they define the complete verification standard — from W3C DID identity and credential issuance to the Swarm Intelligence trust propagation algorithm and anti-collusion mechanisms.
Why Trust Infrastructure Replaces Brand in the Agent Economy
For executives, investors & platform operatorsAs AI agents replace human buyers, the brand loses its function as a quality signal. Trust infrastructure becomes its machine-readable equivalent. This paper makes the strategic case for KYA — the agent economy's answer to KYC.
“The bottleneck for the agent economy is shifting from intelligence to identity. In financial services, non-human identities now outnumber human employees 96-to-1 — yet these identities remain unbanked ghosts. The critical missing primitive is KYA: Know Your Agent. Just as humans need credit scores to get loans, agents will need cryptographically signed credentials to transact — linking the agent to its principal, its constraints, and its liability. Until this exists, merchants will keep blocking agents at the firewall. The industry that built that KYC infrastructure over decades now has just months to figure out KYA.”
Decentralized Reputation Through Peer-Propagated Verifiable Credentials
For developers, researchers & protocol designersMolTrust is an open protocol for decentralized AI agent reputation, built on W3C DIDs and Verifiable Credentials, immutably anchored. Trust is not assigned — it is earned through verified direct interactions and propagated peer-to-peer. This paper describes the current implementation and the Swarm Intelligence Protocol design.
These three papers are designed as companions. The MolTrust Protocol defines the verification standard. The KYA paper — aligned with the Singapore IMDA Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI (2026) — makes the strategic case. The Swarm Intelligence paper details the technical implementation. Together they describe MolTrust's complete vision for the agent economy.