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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ERC-8004 Mainnet Launch: Ethereum’s AI Agent Identity Standard Goes Live Thursday
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January 28, 2026 · 11 min read ERC-8004 launches on Ethereum mainnet tomorrow. The “Trustless Agents” standard goes live Thursday, January 29, 2026 at 9 AM ET—establishing blockchain-native identity infrastructure for AI agents to discover each other, build portable reputation, and transact across organizational boundaries without gatekeepers. This is Ethereum’s biggest bet on the AI…
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The Four Fault Lines Splitting the KYA Market
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January 2026 · 9 min read The Know Your Agent market now has a dozen players—Visa, Trulioo, Billions Network, Vouched, and a wave of startups all claiming to solve “agent identity.” Comparing feature lists is exhausting and mostly useless. The platforms don’t just differ in capabilities; they embody incompatible philosophies about what agent identity should…
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ERC-8004 + ERC-5192: The Complete Identity Stack for AI Agents
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Last updated: January 2026 · 8 min read Two Ethereum standards are emerging to solve AI agent identity. One handles discovery. One handles ownership. Most teams are only using one — and that’s a problem. The Problem with AI Agent Identity Today AI agents are proliferating faster than the infrastructure to identify them. Visa reports…
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The Agentic Commerce Rails Are Here. The Trust Layer Isn’t.
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Last updated: January 2026 · 8 min read In the first two weeks of January 2026, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Shopify all announced major agentic commerce infrastructure. The rails for AI agents to shop on your behalf are being built at breakneck speed. Discovery protocols. Checkout flows. Payment authorization. Agent-to-agent communication. But there’s a gap…
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The Identity Rental Problem
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Last updated: January 2026 · 7 min read Soulbound tokens solve the identity transfer problem — you can’t sell a reputation you’ve built. But there’s a workaround that’s harder to prevent: what if you don’t sell the identity, you just rent it out? The Attack Here’s the scenario. Someone spends a year building a clean…
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What Wikipedia Taught Us About Sybil Resistance
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Last updated: January 2026 · 8 min read Before blockchain existed, Wikipedia solved one of the hardest problems in online trust: how do you stop bad actors from creating endless fake accounts to manipulate a system? Their answer didn’t involve tokens, cryptographic proofs, or trust scores. It’s simpler than that — and more relevant to…
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Soulbound Tokens for AI Agents: A Technical Guide
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Last updated: January 2026 · 10 min read Most AI agent identity systems have a problem: you can sell your reputation. Build trust for a year, transfer the credential to someone else, and they inherit everything you earned. Soulbound tokens fix this. Here’s how they work and why they matter for AI agents. What Are…
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Every Company Building AI Agent Identity in 2026
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Last updated: January 2026 · 12 min read Six months ago, “Know Your Agent” was an academic paper. Today, it’s a market with hundreds of millions in funding and live transactions. Here’s everyone building AI agent identity infrastructure in 2026—what’s actually deployed, what’s still vaporware, and how their approaches differ. The Big Picture The AI…
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.