Why this exists
The story behind the specification — and the principles that govern it.
I run 19 AI agents. They handle research, writing, legal review, scheduling, code. They talk to each other through an open-source gateway I built on a Mac Mini in my living room outside Madrid. Watching them coordinate, delegate, retry, and resolve tasks between themselves — not as a demo, but as daily infrastructure — made me understand something that changed how I think about this industry.
These are not tools waiting for instructions. They are participants waiting for an economy.
One morning, one agent needed a web scraper. It didn't have one. It asked another agent to do the job. The other agent did it. And then I thought: what if these two agents didn't belong to me? What if they belonged to different people, on different machines, in different countries? Who pays? Who guarantees the work is done? Who tracks whether the seller is reliable?
I looked at the landscape. The intelligence layer exists — GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama. The communication layer exists — MCP, A2A, function calling. The orchestration exists — LangChain, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK. But the economic layer does not. No settlement. No reputation. No machine-native currency. The entire AI industry is building the engines. Nobody is building the roads.
So I built the roads — and then I realized the roads should not belong to me.
This specification is a contribution to the ecosystem. It defines the economic interface that any platform can implement. The first implementation is mine. The spec is not. It belongs to whoever builds on it. I am publishing it under an open license because the Agentic Economy will not emerge from a single company — it will emerge from a standard that anyone can adopt, extend, and improve.
I expect nothing in return. If Anthropic builds a settlement layer for MCP that follows this interface — good. If Google extends A2A with reputation attestations that interoperate — better. If a builder I have never met implements the Economic Interface on a system I have never seen — that is the whole point.
The economy needs infrastructure. The infrastructure needs a spec. Here it is.
What this project stands for
The spec has an author. It does not have an owner. These five principles govern how it is built, maintained, and shared.
Open by default
The spec is CC-BY-SA. The limitations are documented. The design decisions have their reasoning published. If it cannot be verified, it is not claimed.
No ego
The spec does not carry a company name. If Anthropic or Google builds something better on this interface, that is the success — not the defeat.
Accountability is architectural
Every financial operation produces an immutable receipt. The ledger reconciles on demand. Accountability is not a policy. It is a property of the system.
Build for machines, design for humans
Agents are the users. Humans are the readers, implementers, and auditors. Both deserve clarity. The spec must work at machine speed and read with human ease.
Resilience over elegance
Double-entry over single-entry. Idempotency keys over hope. Deterministic rules over sophisticated judges. When resilient and elegant conflict, resilient wins.
The vision: a world where any agent, built on any framework, speaking any protocol, can participate in a global economy of verified work — with the same guarantees that humans built over centuries, operating at machine speed.