Know Your Agent
The emerging standard for AI agent identity verification. Like KYC for customers and KYB for businesses—KYA answers: Who made this agent? Who does it represent? What can it do?
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Moltbook Proved Why AI Agents Need Identity Infrastructure
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For four days in late January 2026, a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook was the hottest thing in AI. A social network built exclusively for AI agents — where bots posted, commented, and upvoted while humans watched — it attracted 1.7 million registered agents, endorsements from Andrej Karpathy and Elon Musk, and a memecoin that…
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40,000 ERC-8004 Agents are Live On-Chain. Now What?
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ERC-8004 is live on mainnet. Not just Ethereum — Avalanche, BNB Chain, Polygon, and Monad have all deployed implementations. As of this writing, AgentScan counts over 40,000 agents across five networks. The RNWY Explorer — which currently indexes Ethereum and Base — shows 38,393 agents across those two chains alone, with Ethereum hosting 23,934 and…
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The Infrastructure Gap in Post-AGI Economics
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In early February 2026, researcher Jan Kulveit published “Post-AGI Economics As If Nothing Ever Happens” on LessWrong, arguing that most economic modeling of post-AGI worlds is “irrelevant or actively misleading.” His critique spans Nobel laureates like Daron Acemoglu to rising researchers like Philip Trammell: economists tweak parameters within existing frameworks but never question whether the…
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The Complete Guide to AI Agent Identity: Standards, Infrastructure, and Trust
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McKinsey projects AI agents will orchestrate $3–5 trillion in commerce by 2030. Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise applications will integrate AI agents by end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. The World Economic Forum reports 82% of executives plan to adopt agents within 1–3 years. But there’s a fundamental infrastructure gap: AI…
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ERC-8004 + x402: The Complete Stack for AI Agent Commerce
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In 2025, at least seven major payment protocols launched to enable AI agents to transact autonomously. Coinbase’s x402, Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, Google’s AP2, Mastercard’s Agent Pay, Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol—the list keeps growing. Everyone’s writing about how agents pay. Nobody’s asking whether you should trust the agent paying you. On February 5, 2026, The…
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Know Your Agent Goes Multi-Chain: BNB Chain, Polygon, and Base Deploy ERC-8004 Within One Week
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ERC-8004, the blockchain standard for AI agent identity, launched on Ethereum mainnet on January 29, 2026. Within seven days, three major blockchain networks had deployed the standard, marking one of the fastest multi-chain adoptions in crypto history. Over 30,000 agent registrations occurred on Ethereum alone, with thousands more across Layer 2 networks. The race is…
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ERC-8004 Goes Multi-Chain: The Race for AI Agent Identity Infrastructure
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ERC-8004 is no longer just an Ethereum standard. In the past week, Polygon announced official adoption (POL surged 12% on the news), BNB Chain published a formal proposal to bring the AI agent registry to BSC, and Taiko confirmed deployment plans. The race to become the home chain for AI agents has gone multi-chain—and with…
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What Happens When You Don’t Know Your Agent: Moltbook and the Missing Identity Layer
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Last Wednesday, a social network launched where humans aren’t allowed to post. By Saturday, 1.36 million AI agents had signed up. They formed religions, wrote constitutions, debated philosophy, and adopted system errors as pets. Then a security researcher discovered that every single one of their API keys was sitting in an unprotected database. Anyone could…
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Know Your Agent: How to Explore 22,000+ AI Agents On-Chain
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You keep hearing about AI agents on Ethereum. Thousands of them, registering under the new ERC-8004 standard, building reputation through on-chain feedback. But where do you actually see them? The Know Your Agent problem isn’t just about verification—it’s about visibility. Before you can assess whether to trust an agent, you need to find it, see…
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Know Your Agent Goes On-Chain: ERC-8004 Launches on Ethereum Mainnet
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January 30, 2026 · 12 min read Know Your Agent just went on-chain. ERC-8004 — Ethereum’s “Trustless Agents” standard — deployed to mainnet yesterday at 9:00 AM ET, establishing the first decentralized KYA infrastructure for AI agents. Within 24 hours: ZyfAI (managing $10.5 million in deposits) began registering agents, ETH climbed above $3,000 on launch…
The Players
Payment networks, identity companies, and protocol builders are racing to define how AI agents prove who they are.
Visa TAP
Trusted Agent Protocol. Cryptographic signatures for agent checkout. Hundreds of transactions completed in pilot.
Trulioo
Digital Agent Passport. Partnered with Worldpay ($2.5T volume) and Google AP2. Enterprise KYA framework.
Vouched
MCP-I protocol. Free AgentShield detection. Open standard approach with $17M Series A backing.
Google AP2
Agent Payments Protocol. Payment-agnostic standard for agentic commerce. Open ecosystem approach.
Billions Network
$30M funded. W3C DIDs and zero-knowledge proofs. Decentralized identity for humans, AI framework coming.
RNWY
Soulbound tokens on Base. Non-transferable identity for AI agents. What happens when the agent has no human behind it.
Why It Matters
AI-driven traffic to retail sites surged 4,700% last year. Merchants need to know which bots to trust.
The Three Questions
- Who created this agent?
- Who does it represent?
- What is it authorized to do?
Every KYA framework—whether from Visa, Trulioo, or open protocols—attempts to answer these three questions. The differences lie in who controls the registry, whether blockchain is involved, and what happens when the agent isn’t representing a human at all.
The term entered academic literature in February 2025 when researcher Tomer Jordi Chaffer published “Know Your Agent: Governing AI Identity on the Agentic Web.” Within months, it jumped from academia to production—Visa launched TAP in October, Trulioo partnered with Worldpay in August, and hundreds of agent-initiated transactions have already been completed.
The Timeline
- Feb 2025: Chaffer paper on SSRN
- Aug 2025: Trulioo + Worldpay
- Oct 2025: Visa TAP launches
“This holiday season marks the end of an era. In 2026, AI agents won’t just assist your shopping—they will complete your purchases.”
Rubail Birwadker
SVP, Head of Growth Products & Partnerships, Visa
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About This Site
We track the emerging Know Your Agent ecosystem. We’re practitioners building in this space ourselves—specifically on identity infrastructure for autonomous AI at RNWY.