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This paper introduces a novel approach to defining individuality for autonomous agents on public blockchains by shifting the trust root from traditional hardware or operator-based models to cryptographic assumptions. The authors design and deploy an agent on Solana devnet, where its neural network weights are deterministically linked to its private key, ensuring identity is cryptographically verified at each state transition. The results demonstrate that the agent successfully operates for over two days on-chain without rejected transitions, showcasing a new paradigm for cryptographic individuality in decentralized systems.
Cryptographic individuality for autonomous agents could redefine trust in decentralized systems, enabling secure and verifiable identities on public blockchains.
A software agent on a public blockchain accumulates authority and economic stakes, raising the engineering question of what makes it count as an individual. The paper's central contribution is a shift of trust root for the key-to-weights binding of agent identity: from hardware, operator, or wrapper trust to cryptographic assumptions enforced by a pinned implementation (liveness, key custody, oracle trust, and the underlying software stack remain external). We design and deploy on Solana devnet an agent whose neural-network weights are a deterministic function of its private key. The binding is committed in zero knowledge at genesis, re-checked against that commitment at every state transition, and signed by the agent into an on-chain history unforkable once finalized; in a PoC-tier extension, a protocol-imposed metabolic cost is debited each cycle from a key-derived economic account, adding a consumption-side economic-viability constraint to the key-history-economy triple. Empirically, the agent completes a 2.36-day on-chain run with two host-side resumptions but no rejected transition, at bounded per-transition verification cost; a substituted substrate is rejected on chain, and independently keyed agents diverge as predicted while a same-key control stays at zero. To our knowledge, this is the first published on-chain agent whose identity primitive is itself a cryptographic invariant re-checked at every state transition. The resulting transition-time invariant instantiates the cryptographic individuality proposed by Suzuki 2026's Artificial Externality framework.
