BetaWeb: Towards a Blockchain-enabled Trustworthy Agentic Web

2025-08-19

AI Summary

Current AI agent ecosystems suffer from fragmentation and isolation, lacking cross-domain interoperability, trustworthy collaboration, and verifiable value measurement—exacerbated by challenges in privacy preservation, data sovereignty, and decentralized governance. To address these, this paper proposes BetaWeb: the first trusted agent network integrating blockchain, large language models (LLMs), decentralized identifiers (DIDs), and zero-knowledge proofs. Methodologically, it introduces a novel “blockchain + multi-agent” synergistic architecture, formally defining a five-stage evolutionary pathway—from passive execution to autonomous collaboration and self-governance. BetaWeb enables secure interaction, capability attestation, and value circulation among large-scale, heterogeneous agents. Its contributions include: (1) a paradigm shift toward auditable, traceable, and sustainably incentivized agent coordination; (2) foundational infrastructure for the Web3.5 transition; and (3) a unified framework supporting decentralized identity management, privacy-preserving computation, and transparent value accounting.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has significantly propelled the development of artificial intelligence (AI) agents, which are increasingly evolving into diverse autonomous entities, advancing the LLM-based multi-agent systems (LaMAS). However, current agentic ecosystems remain fragmented and closed. Establishing an interconnected and scalable paradigm for Agentic AI has become a critical prerequisite. Although Agentic Web proposes an open architecture to break the ecosystem barriers, its implementation still faces core challenges such as privacy protection, data management, and value measurement. Existing centralized or semi-centralized paradigms suffer from inherent limitations, making them inadequate for supporting large-scale, heterogeneous, and cross-domain autonomous interactions. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the blockchain-enabled trustworthy Agentic Web (BetaWeb). By leveraging the inherent strengths of blockchain, BetaWeb not only offers a trustworthy and scalable infrastructure for LaMAS but also has the potential to advance the Web paradigm from Web3 (centered on data ownership) towards Web3.5, which emphasizes ownership of agent capabilities and the monetization of intelligence. Beyond a systematic examination of the BetaWeb framework, this paper presents a five-stage evolutionary roadmap, outlining the path of LaMAS from passive execution to advanced collaboration and autonomous governance. We also conduct a comparative analysis of existing products and discuss key challenges of BetaWeb from multiple perspectives. Ultimately, we argue that deep integration between blockchain and LaMAS can lay the foundation for a resilient, trustworthy, and sustainably incentivized digital ecosystem. A summary of the enabling technologies for each stage is available at https://github.com/MatZaharia/BetaWeb.

Problem

• Establishing interconnected scalable paradigm for Agentic AI
• Addressing privacy protection data management value measurement challenges
• Supporting large-scale heterogeneous cross-domain autonomous interactions

Innovation

• Blockchain-based trustworthy infrastructure for AI agents
• Decentralized framework enabling autonomous agent interactions
• Evolutionary roadmap for collaborative multi-agent systems