Agentic Economy: Overview

Reading Paths by Role

Six common entry points. Each one names the pages to read in order and what each one gives you.

I'm integrating chio for procurement (backend dev)

Quickstart: a 15-minute runnable example that gets a kernel signing receipts against a tool server.
Worked Example: a 9-station walkthrough of the cross-org transaction shape.
Manifests: the provider side, signing keys and pricing block.
Pricing: the buyer side, how quotes attach to a governed intent.
Bilateral Receipts: cross-org receipts and the shared governed-intent hash.

I operate the Chio economy in production (SRE / platform)

Operating an Economy: config patterns, runtime knobs, and indexer cursors.
Failure Recovery: what to expect when oracles, peers, or rails misbehave.
Reconciliation: the cost-cycle math (authorize, capture, reconcile).
Regulatory APIs: read-only receipt export for compliance review.
Observability: metrics, traces, and alerting on the kernel.

I'm auditing or compliance

Compliance Certificates: the signed auditor record attached to a passport.
Regulatory APIs: the read-only receipt export.
Bilateral Receipts: dual-signed bilateral receipts from two kernels.
Portable Reputation: attenuated reputation inputs across organizations.

I work in finance / treasury

Pricing: the cost model, quotes, and how charges are bound.
Reconciliation: quoted versus charged, and how the delta clears.
Settlement Rails: rails comparison (EVM, Solana, CCIP, x402).
On-Chain Settlement: the Web3 path with escrow and dual-sign release.

I work in insurance / risk

Underwriting: risk taxonomy and decision outcomes.
Credit Facilities: bonds, capital book, and exposure ledger.
Liability Market: coverage classes and pricing-authority envelopes.
Claims: the lifecycle from filing through dispute path.

I'm building on the economy stack (contributor / extension author)

The Economic Stack: the crate map, with deps and trust boundaries.
Worked Example: how the pieces fit together in one transaction.
Manifests: signing operations and key rotation.
Reputation: deterministic local scoring against a corpus.

Four Stages

This overview presents four stages. Each stage uses the records produced by the preceding stage.

Stage	State	What changes
01 Today	Actions fire into the void	Agents call tools without identity, budgets, or evidence. The infrastructure cannot verify the invocation's terms.
02 The Kernel	A single, fail-closed mediator	Chio validates capabilities and runs the guard pipeline before any tool is invoked. No valid capability, no action.
03 The Receipt	Cryptographic evidence	Signed, Merkle-committed receipts record allows, denials, cancellations, and incomplete calls for audit, billing, and compliance.
04 The Economy	Portable trust across organizations	Agent passports, federated policies, and settlement components. Agents and operators can verify what happened.

Stages 1 and 2 are covered by the Kernel section. Stage 3 is covered by Economics and billing exports. This area documents Stage 4, the cross-organization commercial system.

Scope of This Area

The Agentic Economy sits above the Kernel. It assumes you already have a kernel that issues receipts and enforces local policy. What it adds:

Portable identity: every agent is a did:chio identifier (the Ed25519 public key in hex), backed by a passport bundle of W3C Verifiable Credentials.
Federated capabilities: two operators can recognize each other's records under stated boundaries, without a shared identity provider.
Signed manifests: tool servers publish what they expose, what it costs, and what permissions they need, signed with their server keypair.
Credit and bonds: agents and operators can post collateral and draw against facilities, with an exposure ledger and a capital book that trace back to receipts.
Insurance and claims: a liability market for quoting, binding, paying premiums, filing claims, and adjudicating outcomes.
Settlement: payment rails for moving value once a receipt has fired, including EVM, Solana, CCIP cross-chain, and x402-style HTTP payments.
Obligations & Chio Paper: receipt-backed obligation atoms and first-assignment factoring of agent receivables.
Clearinghouse: multilateral netting that collapses reserved obligations into the minimal set of settlement intents.
Payment Channels: streaming micro-escrow for high-frequency, low-value calls that settle once at close.
Outcome-Based Pricing: results-priced calls, captured in full only when the output satisfies a declared predicate.
Operations: regulator and counterparty visibility into the same receipt stream.

Difference from Economics

The Economics page documents the single-org budget primitives: MonetaryAmount, three-tier budgets, the authorize, capture, and reconcile cycle, and FinancialReceiptMetadata. The Agentic Economy uses those primitives as building blocks. It covers what happens when the buyer and the seller live on opposite sides of an organizational trust boundary.

Glossary

Definitions used across the section. Each term maps to a Chio type or protocol record. Where multiple types share a name, the table names the primary one.

Term	Definition	Primary type
Passport	Unsigned bundle of independently signed credentials carried by an agent across organizations.	`chio_credentials::AgentPassport`
Credential	A canonically JSON-signed claim about an agent (identity, reputation, certification) that anyone can verify with the issuer's public key.	`chio_credentials::*Credential`
Capability	A signed token granting a subject the right to invoke specific tools, with optional budgets and constraints.	`chio_core::capability::CapabilityToken`
Mandate	A policy-level constraint a principal places on a delegated capability (max amount, autonomy tier, governed-intent bindings).	`GovernedTransactionIntent`
Receipt	Signed record of a tool invocation: action, decision, evidence, content hashes. The unit of audit and billing.	`chio_core::receipt::ChioReceipt`
Ledger	Aggregated view of receipts and decisions filtered by capability, tool, agent, or time window.	`ExposureLedgerReport`
Facility	A pre-approved credit line an operator extends to an agent or counterparty, drawn against during execution.	`CreditFacilityArtifact`
Bond	Posted collateral that backs higher-risk delegated execution. Released, impaired, or expired through lifecycle events.	`CreditBondArtifact`
Scorecard	Deterministic rating computed from a local corpus of receipts, capability lineage, and budget records.	`CreditScorecardReport` / `LocalReputationScorecard`
Premium	The price quoted for binding a liability coverage to a governed action.	`UnderwritingPremiumQuote`
Claim	A request for payout against a bound coverage, with evidence references and an adjudication outcome.	`LiabilityClaimPackageArtifact`
Settlement	Movement of value across a payment rail to clear a charge that a receipt has authorized.	`SettlementCommitment`
Exposure	Outstanding committed cost a capability or facility represents at a point in time.	`ExposureLedgerSummary`
Federation	Bilateral agreement between two operators to recognize each other's signed records under stated policy boundaries.	`FederationActivationExchangeArtifact`
Underwriting	Pre-action risk classification that produces a decision outcome (admit, deny, require remediation) and a premium quote.	`UnderwritingDecisionArtifact`
Attenuation	Monotonic narrowing applied to a delegated capability: tighter budgets, fewer tools, shorter expiry.	`capability::Attenuation`
Reputation	Behavior signal computed from receipts: boundary pressure, resource stewardship, reliability, incident history.	`LocalReputationScorecard`

Types define the terms

Each term in the table resolves to a struct or enum in the Chio crates. When prose and code disagree, the code wins. Use the type names in the right-hand column as search anchors.

The Cross-Org Shape

A single procurement transaction, in plain terms, looks like this:

A buyer agent presents a passport and a capability with a budget.
A provider publishes a signed manifest declaring its tools and pricing.
The buyer assembles a GovernedTransactionIntent binding a MeteredBillingQuote from the provider to its action.
The buyer's kernel authorizes the budget. Both kernels run their guard pipelines.
The tool runs. Both kernels co-sign receipts that share a governed intent hash.
Reconciliation: actual cost is compared to the authorized amount. Settlement dispatches over the configured rail.
Reputation, exposure, and capital book updates land. The audit trail is the same receipt record a regulator can ingest.

Step 4 is where the Kernel ends and the Economy begins. Steps 5 through 7 are what this area is about. The Worked Example page traces each step to the implementation.

The Five Themes

This area is organized into five themes plus an operations track. Each links to its own pages.

Reputation and Identity

How an agent says who it is, what it has done, and what others think of it. Passports (bundle format and verification), Reputation (deterministic local scoring), Scorecards (credit and reputation reports), Portable Reputation (crossing operator boundaries with attenuation), Compliance Certificates (signed certifications attached to passports and decisions).

Federation

How two operators can transact without a shared trust anchor. Bilateral Federation (activation exchange, peer pinning, anti-eclipse policy) and Bilateral Receipts (dual-signed bilateral receipts shared between two kernels). For the single-org primitives, see Federation Overview.

Marketplace

How buyers find services, evaluate them, and bind their pricing. Manifests (signed tool declarations with pricing and SLA hints), Pricing (flat, per-invocation, per-unit, hybrid), Discovery (listings, search, admissibility filtering).

Credit, Insurance, and Risk

How exposure is sized, priced, and covered. Underwriting (risk classification and decision outcomes), Credit Facilities (pre-approved credit lines and bonds), Liability Market (quoting, binding, pricing authority), Claims (evidence packages, adjudication, payouts).

Settlement

How cleared charges actually move value. Settlement Rails (EVM, Solana, CCIP, x402, Circle nanopayments, ERC-4337), On-chain Settlement (escrow dispatch, dual-sign release, watchdog jobs), Reconciliation (authorized versus actual cost, settlement state).

Operations

How operators and regulators see the system. Regulatory APIs (the same receipt stream, projected for compliance review) and Operating (runtime status, indexer cursors, alerts, recovery records).

How to Read This Area

Three good entry points depending on what you are after.

If you want the architecture: read The Economic Stack first, then pick a theme.
If you want to see it move: read Worked Example and follow links into the primitives it touches.
If you have a use case: jump straight to the relevant theme. Each page links back to the types and adjacent primitives.

The TCB has not moved

The Agentic Economy adds value on top of the kernel. It does not change what is in the trusted computing base. Federation, underwriting, settlement, and reputation are operator-replaceable. The kernel that signs receipts is not.

reading-order.txt

# A reasonable order if you read top to bottom:
overview                  # you are here
stack                     # crates and their relationships
worked-example            # one complete transaction
manifests / pricing       # the seller side
passports / reputation    # the buyer side
bilateral-federation      # cross-organization federation
underwriting              # risk and premium
credit-facilities         # lines of credit and bonds
liability-market / claims # coverage and payouts
settlement-rails          # how value moves
reconciliation            # reconcile and settle charges
regulatory-apis           # what auditors see
operating                 # runtime knobs

What This Area Is Not

Not a kernel tutorial: see the Quickstart and the Kernel. Not the single-org budget reference: see Economics. Not a replacement for the formal proofs: the Lean 4 model in formal/ is the authoritative source for monotonic attenuation and related properties. Not a roadmap: crates and pages described here exist in the source today.

PreviousEconomics NextThe Economic Stack