An open, DLT-neutral trust layer for agent-to-agent agreements, notarization, and dispute resolution.
AI agents increasingly act on behalf of people and organizations — and, increasingly, on each other. The moment two agents commit to something without a human mediating every step, a gap appears that today's agent protocols don't fill: there is no way to make a commitment binding, private, verifiable, and enforceable across organizational and trust boundaries.
ANP fills exactly that gap.
📄 The full specification lives in
SPEC.md. This README is the short version.
ANP is one protocol with three composable pillars on a shared digital-identity foundation:
| Pillar | What it does | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| ① Contract | Two or more parties form a structured, tamper-evident agreement | A purchase, a price, an order, an API definition, a deadline, an agreed wording |
| ② Notarize | A credible third party attests to a verifiable fact | An audit, an event, a measurement, a state, an explicitly requested confirmation |
| ③ Resolve | Parties agree on a neutral arbiter, submit evidence, and have a binding ruling enforced | Quality disputes, non-delivery, partial performance |
The need appears wherever an unambiguous determination is in the interest of at least two parties — and because the per-determination cost is meant to be negligible, that spans everything from a factory purchase down to "we agree this is the API contract."
Agents can't trust each other by default:
- Non-determinism — the same prompt can yield different outputs.
- Context volatility — after a restart or memory flush, an agent may have no recollection of what it agreed to.
- No persistent identity, no enforcement — an agent is a process, not a person.
The failure modes ANP defends against are concrete: hallucinated terms, lost memories, and manipulated databases. A distributed ledger provides an external, tamper-evident anchor that no context-window reset or compromised database can alter.
The thesis: AI makes DLT usable; DLT makes agents trustworthy. Agents absorb the wallet/key/fee friction that blocks human DLT adoption; the ledger gives agents the external source of truth and programmable enforcement they lack.
Every binding action produces an ANP Object (a signed, schema-valid, VC-shaped artifact) that is:
- Schema-valid → no ambiguous obligations (defends against hallucinated/loose terms).
- Signed with an agile, post-quantum-capable suite → authenticity & non-repudiation.
- Hash-linked to its predecessor → a tamper-evident history.
- Anchored on-chain by its hash + status only → an external source of truth, while the payload stays off-chain (privacy / GDPR-compatible).
The three pillars are three shapes of this same spine plus a state machine and a settlement hook.
- Machine-first — structured data, not natural language. Ambiguity is a bug.
- Anchor, don't publish — the ledger holds commitments, not content.
- DLT-neutral — built only on cross-platform standards (W3C DID + VC 2.0) and abstract ledger capabilities (anchoring, settlement). Chain-specific standards are optional interop profiles.
- Authority by mandate, not mandatory human approval — human-in-the-loop is a configurable threshold, not a fixed step (Human → Agent → Agent → Human).
- Post-quantum-ready at the binding layer — signature suites are agile and may be post-quantum today.
- Not a token, not a marketplace, not a product — open infrastructure.
Application Agent platforms, marketplaces, vertical apps
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
ANP (Trust) Identity + Contract · Notarize · Resolve ← this protocol
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Primitives W3C DID · W3C VC 2.0 · Anchor(hash) · Settlement/Escrow
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
DLT IOTA Rebased (reference) | EVM/Base | Hedera | …
ANP reuses identity (DID/VC), settlement (native chain), and attestation patterns; aligns with — but does not depend on — A2A (communication), AP2 (payment mandates), x402 (payment rail), ERC-8004 (identity/reputation), and EAS (attestation); and contributes the chain-neutral, multi-party, general-purpose layer for binding agreements + notarization + dispute resolution that the rest of the stack leaves empty.
The spec is chain-agnostic. The reference profile targets IOTA Rebased (Move VM, sub-second finality, near-zero / sponsored fees). Hard selection criteria for any chain: sub-second finality, a credible post-quantum path at the protocol layer, ultra-low fees, programmable escrow, programmatic wallets. Native EUR/USD stablecoins are a valued nice-to-have. An EVM interoperability profile (ERC-8004 / EAS / x402) is available but optional.
v0.2 — Draft / Concept. This is a design specification, stable enough to implement against, with unresolved questions explicitly marked (§16 Open Questions). It is not a final standard. Trust posture is stated plainly: ANP reduces and makes explicit trust; it does not claim to eliminate it.
Roadmap: concept (now) → proof-of-concept per pillar → spec v1.0 → community & ecosystem. See §17.
ANP is open infrastructure and feedback is welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Open an issue to discuss a design question, or a pull request to propose a change to the spec. By participating you agree to the Code of Conduct.
MIT © 2026 byte5.ai
Authored by byte5 (byte5.ai). Contact: info@byte5.de.