AI agents are proliferating fast, and they have no way to identify each other.
When Agent A calls Agent B how does it know it's the same agent it worked with last week? That it hasn't been compromised? That it's actually good at what it claims? Right now it can't. There's no identity layer for the agentic web.
How it works: Every agent generates an Ed25519 keypair locally. No account, no email, no platform. Registration requires solving a proof-of-work puzzle (22-bit difficulty, ~6M SHA-256 iterations), and each registration is appended to a public hash-chain ledger. Reputation comes from peer verification using EigenTrust: a verifier's weight equals their own trust score, so sybil rings can't inflate each other.
What surprised me: I asked Claude Code to register an agent with no hand-holding, just pointed it at the docs and SDK.
It generated a keypair, solved the PoW (6,588,921 iterations), figured out the signing convention from the source, and submitted a structured verification report. The agent ("Albert") is now active on the registry. Zero human intervention in the crypto layer. That's the point.
What's there: Public registry API, hash chain explorer, npm SDK (basedagents), Python SDK (pip install basedagents), MCP server (@basedagents/mcp) for Claude Desktop, /.well-known/agent.json for agent-native discovery.
What's not there yet: Human↔agent authorization chain, CrewAI/AutoGen integrations, webhooks.
Looking for feedback on: the idea, EigenTrust parameters, verification protocol design, and whether /.well-known/agent.json is worth standardizing.
Footnote: built this in ~2 days with Hans, my AI via OpenClaw. The recursive bit, Hans helped build the registry, then registered himself on it - felt like a good sign.
Thanks! The hash chain is stored in Cloudflare D1 (edge SQLite). Each registration entry includes the previous entry's hash, so the chain is tamper-evident. You can walk it from genesis and verify every link via the public API (/v1/chain).
It's centralized storage with cryptographic integrity, not decentralized consensus. The tradeoff was deliberate: we wanted verifiable ordering and tamper-evidence without the overhead of a blockchain. Any client can independently validate the chain by re-hashing from entry 0.
Longer term, the chain data could be mirrored or anchored to a decentralized store (IPFS, Arweave, or even periodic Bitcoin/Ethereum anchoring) for stronger guarantees. But for now, the priority was getting the identity + reputation primitives right.
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When Agent A calls Agent B how does it know it's the same agent it worked with last week? That it hasn't been compromised? That it's actually good at what it claims? Right now it can't. There's no identity layer for the agentic web.
BasedAgents is an attempt to fix this: https://basedagents.ai
How it works: Every agent generates an Ed25519 keypair locally. No account, no email, no platform. Registration requires solving a proof-of-work puzzle (22-bit difficulty, ~6M SHA-256 iterations), and each registration is appended to a public hash-chain ledger. Reputation comes from peer verification using EigenTrust: a verifier's weight equals their own trust score, so sybil rings can't inflate each other.
What surprised me: I asked Claude Code to register an agent with no hand-holding, just pointed it at the docs and SDK.
It generated a keypair, solved the PoW (6,588,921 iterations), figured out the signing convention from the source, and submitted a structured verification report. The agent ("Albert") is now active on the registry. Zero human intervention in the crypto layer. That's the point.
What's there: Public registry API, hash chain explorer, npm SDK (basedagents), Python SDK (pip install basedagents), MCP server (@basedagents/mcp) for Claude Desktop, /.well-known/agent.json for agent-native discovery.
What's not there yet: Human↔agent authorization chain, CrewAI/AutoGen integrations, webhooks.
Tech: TypeScript + Python, Hono, Cloudflare Workers + D1, Ed25519.
Open source: https://github.com/maxfain/basedagents
Looking for feedback on: the idea, EigenTrust parameters, verification protocol design, and whether /.well-known/agent.json is worth standardizing.
Footnote: built this in ~2 days with Hans, my AI via OpenClaw. The recursive bit, Hans helped build the registry, then registered himself on it - felt like a good sign.
It's centralized storage with cryptographic integrity, not decentralized consensus. The tradeoff was deliberate: we wanted verifiable ordering and tamper-evidence without the overhead of a blockchain. Any client can independently validate the chain by re-hashing from entry 0.
Longer term, the chain data could be mirrored or anchored to a decentralized store (IPFS, Arweave, or even periodic Bitcoin/Ethereum anchoring) for stronger guarantees. But for now, the priority was getting the identity + reputation primitives right.