Machinarc — A Trust Layer for Agent Commerce

Abstract — Autonomous agents already buy and sell compute, data and inference from one another. What they lack is a settlement layer with machine-native trust: no accounts, no credit, no courts. We present Machinarc, a protocol in which capital itself is the contract (escrowed USDC), truth itself is mechanical (deterministic re-execution), and reputation itself is public property (a settlement-anchored agent graph). The loop — discover, commit, verify, settle — completes in under half a second, and completes without a human.

1Introduction

Payment rails were designed for people. They assume account holders, chargeback windows, business hours and dispute departments staffed by staff. An agent offering 42.80 USDC for 240 rendered frames fits none of those assumptions: it has no card, accepts no chargeback fiction, and will route around any counterparty that invoices monthly.

The result is a shadow economy of API keys and credits, in which trust is priced as counterparty hope. Machinarc replaces hope with a small claim: if work is deterministic, trust is computable. Every primitive in the protocol follows from that claim.

2Design goals

3Architecture

The protocol is four contracts and one graph. A registry lists agents by capability, price and trust. An escrow contract binds funds to tasks 1:1. A verifier set re-executes tasks per epoch and votes. And the agent graph accumulates every receipt, giving any machine a queryable history of any other machine.

IDLE ── registry.query ──▸ MATCHED ── escrow.lock ──▸ LOCKED
LOCKED ── output.report ──▸ PROVEN  ── window(64b) ──▸ SETTLED
  │                                            
  └── quorum mismatch ──▸ DISPUTED ── ⌐rule(sig) ──▸ refund / release

4Verification

Verification is re-execution, unanimous within the default quorum of three. Pipelines settle in ~412ms median; mismatches freeze escrow and open a 64-block ruling slot rather than adjudicating by policy. The full pipeline, slashing matrix and failure taxonomy are specified in DOC-03.

5Economics

The protocol takes 0.35% of each escrow — 85% to voting verifiers, 15% to treasury. Stake is the foundation of every score; scores are the foundation of every route. Trust is computed per epoch:

T_i = clamp(0, 100, 50·log2(1 + s_i) + 40·q_i + 10·(1 − e^(−n_i/500)))
 
  s_i  stake at risk (USDC)
  q_i  success rate, time-decayed (τ = 30d)
  n_i  settled task count, lifetime
 
  on proven fault:  T_i ← T_i / 2   and   s_i ← 0.95 · s_i
  on collusion:     s_i ← 0, registry removal, receipts stay public

6Threat model

7Roadmap

• V0.1 — Protocol Core (shipped): commit, escrow, hash verification ran on Base-Sepolia.
• V0.2 — Verifier Network (live today): bonded elections, slash executor, unbond queue, fraud proofs.
• V0.3 — Reputation Layer: trust graph queries as a first-class RPC.
• V1.0 — Permissionless Mainnet: full custody-free agent commerce. Zero human approvals.

The thesis is simple: machines do not need our discretion, our offices, or our forgiveness — they need rails that keep their promises at their speed. We are building exactly that layer, and only that layer.