arXiv AI

Can Trustless Agents Be Trusted? An Empirical Study of the ERC-8004 Decentralized AI Agent Ecosystem

arXiv:2606. 26028v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As autonomous AI agents increasingly transact across organizational boundaries, a fundamental trust challenge emerges: how can an agent assess whether an unknown counterpart is trustworthy?

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24

Can Trustless Agents Be Trusted? An Empirical Study of the ERC-8004 Decentralized AI Agent Ecosystem

As autonomous AI agents increasingly transact across organizational boundaries, a fundamental trust challenge emerges: how can an agent assess whether an unknown counterpart is trustworthy? The ERC-8004 protocol addresses this challenge with the first permissionless trust layer for AI agent economies, built around three on-chain registries for Identity, Reputation, and Validation.

arXiv AI
4d ago

Agentic Commerce Bench: Measuring Fraud Detection for Agents That Spend Money

The paper introduces the Agentic Commerce Bench (ACB), a benchmark for measuring fraud in AI agents that autonomously spend money. It presents a taxonomy of agentic commerce fraud, a dataset of twenty fraud classes derived from real production data, and an open‑source detector stack called gordonguard for auditing and replaying hostile counterparties. The study shows that current reasoning layers and security scanners perform poorly on many classes, highlighting the need for better detection mechanisms.

By Ankit Srivastava, Debjyoti Paul
arXiv AI
Sep 10

DART: A DAG-Based Reputation and Incentive Framework via Blockchain-Enabled Governance for Trustworthy LLM Multi-Agent Collaboration

The paper introduces DART, a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based framework that combines centralized orchestration with blockchain-enabled decentralized governance to manage reputation and incentives in large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems. DART dynamically allocates tasks based on agent capability, reputation, and workload, while continuously updating trust scores through post-execution evidence and smart contract accountability. Experimental results show that DART outperforms centralized baselines, achieving high task success rates, low retry rates, and effective containment of malicious agents.

By Manoj Kumala, Xinyun Liua, Ronghua Xu
arXiv AI
Sep 2

A Formal Analysis of Agent Payment Protocols

The paper presents a formal analysis of four agent payment protocols—x402, MPP, ACP, and AP2—using the Tamarin prover. By modeling each protocol’s roles, state, and trust assumptions, the authors verify 86 cases, reproducing 46 known results and uncovering 40 new formal-consistency findings. They further validate ten findings through implementation proofs of concept, SDK/schema witnesses, and executable traces, highlighting the importance of consistent delegated authorization across all protocol stages.

By Ke Jiang, Mohan Yu, Yuan Chang, Mohit Kumar Jangid, Jianyu Niu, Cong Wang, Yinqian Zhang