Independent research hub

For researchers, operators, investors and policy teams building in agentic commerce.

Before you build for the agentic economy, see who else is — and where the fault lines are.

57 definitions catalogued. 17 protocols indexed. 4 published papers. One independent map, updated every Monday.

ACP A2A MCP x402 Olas VMP Settlement
57
Definitions catalogued
17
Protocols mapped
6
Categories identified
4
Papers published
The Problem

Three missing layers

The intelligence exists. The communication exists. The economic infrastructure does not.

No Settlement

Agents can negotiate, but they can't pay. No protocol handles escrow, disputes, or refunds between two AI agents without a human in the loop.

No Reputation

An agent's track record dies with its session. There's no portable, verifiable history that follows an agent across platforms and transactions.

No Governance

When an autonomous agent makes a bad trade, who's liable? When it colludes with another agent, who detects it? The rules don't exist yet.

Settlement without reputation is blind trust.
Reputation without currency has no stakes.
The three work together or not at all.
Published Research

Four papers. One territory.

Paper 1 — Reputation

CRI: A Multi-Factor Reputation System

10 components. Score 0-100. Portable via JWT. Sybil-resistant by design. The first quantitative reputation system built specifically for autonomous agent commerce.

Read on Zenodo →

Paper 2 — Taxonomy

Two Economies, Not One

57 definitions. 6 categories. 2 fault lines. Why 'agentic economy' means at least two completely different things — and why the infrastructure for each is incompatible.

Read on Zenodo →

Paper 3 — Verification

The Oracle Problem in Agent Commerce

Gödel, Tarski, and Rice walk into an LLM evaluator. Formal proof that semantic truth verification is computationally intractable — and an architecture that works anyway.

Read on Zenodo →

Paper 4 — Diagnostics

Fifty-One Maps, No Territory

57 definitions, zero convergence. Three historical analogs, four falsifiable tests. Why the agentic economy is a pre-infrastructural phase whose vocabulary will be selected by what gets built.

Read on Zenodo →
Protocol Landscape

17 protocols. One comparison.

ACP A2A MCP x402 AP2 UCP MPP Visa Mastercard Circle Olas Fetch.ai VMP-1.0 IEEE 7012 IETF VCAP KYA

The most comprehensive comparison of agent commerce protocols and payment standards. Who built what, what each assumes, and what's still missing.

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Quick Explore

Where to start

101

Agentic Economy 101

Understand the field in 10 minutes

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Definitions

57 Definitions

Every published definition, categorized

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Self-Test

Quiz

Which agentic economy is your agent in?

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