Internalising the Identity Primitive: Cryptographic Individuality for an Autonomous Agent on a Public Blockchain

2026-08-03

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of verifiable and persistent identity for autonomous software agents on public blockchains by introducing a novel paradigm that anchors agent identity in cryptographic assumptions. It deterministically derives neural network weights from private keys and employs zero-knowledge proofs at every state transition to verify the binding among the key, model, and interaction history, thereby ensuring inseparability between identity and economic stake. The proposed framework establishes, for the first time, a cryptographic invariant–based agent identity primitive on-chain and incorporates a protocol-level metabolic cost mechanism. Experimental validation on the Solana testnet over 2.36 continuous days confirmed that all state transitions were correctly verified: agents sharing the same private key exhibited consistent behavior, those with distinct keys diverged meaningfully, and unauthorized model substitutions were rejected on-chain.

Abstract

A software agent on a public blockchain accumulates authority and economic stakes, raising the engineering question of what makes it count as an individual. The paper's central contribution is a shift of trust root for the key-to-weights binding of agent identity: from hardware, operator, or wrapper trust to cryptographic assumptions enforced by a pinned implementation (liveness, key custody, oracle trust, and the underlying software stack remain external). We design and deploy on Solana devnet an agent whose neural-network weights are a deterministic function of its private key. The binding is committed in zero knowledge at genesis, re-checked against that commitment at every state transition, and signed by the agent into an on-chain history unforkable once finalized; in a PoC-tier extension, a protocol-imposed metabolic cost is debited each cycle from a key-derived economic account, adding a consumption-side economic-viability constraint to the key-history-economy triple. Empirically, the agent completes a 2.36-day on-chain run with two host-side resumptions but no rejected transition, at bounded per-transition verification cost; a substituted substrate is rejected on chain, and independently keyed agents diverge as predicted while a same-key control stays at zero. To our knowledge, this is the first published on-chain agent whose identity primitive is itself a cryptographic invariant re-checked at every state transition. The resulting transition-time invariant instantiates the cryptographic individuality proposed by Suzuki 2026's Artificial Externality framework.

Problem

• cryptographic individuality
• agent identity
• blockchain
• identity primitive
• public blockchain

Innovation

• cryptographic individuality
• zero-knowledge commitment
• key-to-weights binding
• on-chain agent identity
• metabolic cost mechanism