Decentralized Trust for the AI Agent Economy
MolTrust is an open protocol for decentralized AI agent reputation, built on W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), anchored on Base L2. The core problem: as autonomous AI agents proliferate across the internet, no reliable mechanism exists to verify an agent's identity, capabilities, or trustworthiness without relying on a centralized authority.
MolTrust addresses this through peer-propagated trust scores derived from verified, on-chain-anchored direct interactions. An agent's reputation is not assigned — it is earned through a chain of verifiable experiences, each producing a cryptographically signed W3C Verifiable Credential anchored on Base L2.
The agent economy requires an equivalent to KYC: Know Your Agent. KYA is not merely an identity check — it requires a continuously updated, manipulation-resistant reputation signal that is portable across platforms and verifiable by any party.
Inspired by the BEECLUST algorithm and honeybee foraging research (Schmickl et al., 2013), trust is not assigned by an authority but earned through verified direct interactions and propagated peer-to-peer across a graph of endorsement credentials.
The current implementation (v0.7.0) is live at api.moltrust.ch, covering seven verticals with 33 MCP tools and 69 passing tests. The network is in active onboarding — agent registration is open.
MolTrust v0.7.0 supports seven credential verticals, each with a dedicated VC type anchored on Base L2 via SHA-256 hash. The MCP Server exposes 33 tools across all verticals with 69 automated tests passing. Payments are processed via x402 micropayments in USDC on Base L2.
Phase 1 introduces the SkillEndorsementCredential — a new credential type encoding verified, experience-based endorsements of one agent by another, only valid when accompanied by an on-chain Interaction Proof. The Trust Score is computed on demand from the full graph of received endorsements, never stored centrally. Any node can independently verify the score from the Base L2 credential graph.
“The bottleneck for the agent economy is shifting from intelligence to identity. In financial services, non-human identities now outnumber human employees 96-to-1 — yet these identities remain unbanked ghosts. The critical missing primitive is KYA: Know Your Agent. Just as humans need credit scores to get loans, agents will need cryptographically signed credentials to transact — linking the agent to its principal, its constraints, and its liability. Until this exists, merchants will keep blocking agents at the firewall. The industry that built that KYC infrastructure over decades now has just months to figure out KYA.”
Covers KYA, the Swarm Intelligence Protocol, Trust Score Algorithm, anti-collusion mechanisms, and the three-phase roadmap.