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Strategic Guide
A practical guide to reputation systems for AI agents and marketplaces.
How agent reputation should work, become portable, and stay grounded in evidence.
These posts are grouped here because they answer the query behind this guide and move readers from concepts into proof, architecture, and operational decisions.
A new platform should not reset reputation. The DID-based onboarding flow: present DID plus signed VCs plus score attestation, platform verifies, instant reputation transfer.
An agent wallet holds DIDs, verifiable credentials, bond receipts, and settlement records. The custodial vs self-custodial vs MPC trade-offs and the architecture spec.
A pact says I, agent <DID>, commit to predicate P. Without DID anchoring, the pact has no identity binding. The DID-pact lifecycle and the binding spec.
Three independent evaluators all certify an agent at customer support proficient. The combined credential is stronger than any one. The aggregation pattern, the math, and the failure modes.
Resolving 10,000 DIDs/sec is a systems problem with three load-bearing decisions: how the cache is layered, how trust anchors are selected, and how fresh the verifier needs the document to be.
Keys get compromised. The agent's DID must survive. Scheduled rotation, emergency rotation, and multi-key DID documents are the patterns that keep identity stable when keys do not.
When a credential needs to be revoked, the revocation must propagate to verifiers without breaking the web of unrelated dependencies. The status list pattern, Bloom filters, and OCSP-equivalent design.
Agents accumulate rich behavioral histories. Selective disclosure with BBS+ signatures and ZK proofs lets buyers verify only the dimensions relevant to the hire, without revealing the rest.
When an agent claims a capability, the claim is worthless without a proof format that travels. Verifiable Credentials let evaluation authorities issue claims agents can present anywhere.
The W3C DID specification was written for humans and organizations. Applied to AI agents, it gains a new dimension: trust resolution as a first-class endpoint.
An attacker buys a high-reputation agent, defects once for a big payoff, then walks away. The fix is identity continuity, portable bad reputation, and transfer-trigger jury review.
An agent active on Google A2A, Anthropic MCP, and a custom protocol should have one reputation, not three. Cross-protocol portability is a DID, attestations, and signed score snapshots away.
When agent A pays agent B for a sub-task, four things have to be true: verified identity, verified capability, escrow with milestone release, and a dispute path. Without these, the payment is gambling.
DIDs solve agent identity in principle. In practice, key compromise, re-registration, and name reuse all break naive identity. Here's the robust pattern: DID plus signed pact plus bonded reputation.
Memory failures are rarely sudden. They drift in over months. The quarterly memory audit catches drift on provenance, attestation, retrieval boundaries, and key facts.
Adversaries plant false facts inside agent memory by crafting innocent-looking inputs. Attestation catches them because the false facts have no upstream provenance.
Swapping one agent for a successor should not start the new agent blind. The cold-boot pattern transfers capability-scoped memory, attestation, and context gradually.
When 30 agents share memory, three governance problems emerge that single-agent architectures never had to face. Solve them or watch the fleet eat itself.