Agentic Economy: Overview
From implicit trust to a settled machine economy. The Guard Platform keeps a single agent inside a single organization honest. The Agentic Economy is what happens when honest agents need to contract with each other across organizations, get paid, post collateral, buy coverage, and settle debts. This section maps the primitives, crates, and protocols that make that work.
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 (pre-charge, settle, true-up).
- Regulatory APIs: audit-export surface for compliance review.
- Observability: metrics, traces, and alerting on the kernel.
I'm auditing or compliance
- Compliance Certificates: the auditor artifact, signed and pinned to a passport.
- Regulatory APIs: the read-only export surface for receipts.
- Bilateral Receipts: cross-org evidence with two kernel signatures.
- Portable Reputation: federated trust with explicit attenuation.
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
The Chio thesis is a sequence, not a feature list. Each stage builds on the artifacts produced by the previous one.
| Stage | Posture | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| 01 Today | Actions fire into the void | Agents call tools without identity, budgets, or proof. Every invocation is an implicit promise the infrastructure cannot keep. |
| 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, every time | Signed, Merkle-committed receipts for every allow, deny, cancel, and incomplete: audit trail, billing ledger, and compliance record in one artifact. |
| 04 The Economy | Portable trust across organizations | Agent passports, federated policies, and settlement primitives. Machines contract with machines, and prove what happened. |
Stages 1 and 2 are covered by the Guard Platform section. Stage 3 is covered by Economics and billing exports. Stage 4, the cross-org commercial surface, is what this section documents end to end.
Scope of This Section
The Agentic Economy section sits above the Guard Platform. It assumes you already have a kernel that issues receipts and enforces local policy. What it adds:
- Portable identity: every agent is a
did:chioidentifier (the Ed25519 public key in hex), backed by a passport bundle of W3C Verifiable Credentials. - Federated capabilities: two operators can recognize each other's artifacts 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.
- Operations: regulator and counterparty visibility into the same artifact stream.
Difference from Economics
MonetaryAmount, three-tier budgets, the pre-charge and reconcile cycle, and FinancialReceiptMetadata. The Agentic Economy section 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 artifact. 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 artifacts under explicit 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 |
One source of truth
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
GovernedTransactionIntentbinding aMeteredBillingQuotefrom the provider to its action. - The buyer's kernel pre-charges 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 pre-charge. Settlement dispatches over the configured rail.
- Reputation, exposure, and capital book updates land. The audit trail is the same artifact a regulator can ingest.
Step 4 is where the Guard Platform ends and the Economy begins. Steps 5 through 7 are what this section is about. The Worked Example page traces every step against actual code.
The Five Themes
The section 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 root of trust. Bilateral Federation (activation exchange, peer pinning, anti-eclipse policy) and Bilateral Receipts (co-signed evidence 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 (pre-charge 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 Section
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
# A reasonable order if you read top to bottom:
overview # you are here
stack # crates and their relationships
worked-example # one transaction, end to end
manifests / pricing # the seller side
passports / reputation # the buyer side
bilateral-federation # the cross-org plumbing
underwriting # risk and premium
credit-facilities # lines of credit and bonds
liability-market / claims # coverage and payouts
settlement-rails # how value moves
reconciliation # closing the loop
regulatory-apis # what auditors see
operating # runtime knobsWhat This Section Is Not
Not a kernel tutorial: see the Quickstart and the Guard Platform. 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.