What makes an agent

Automation isn't an agent until it can be held to account.

A program that spends your money but has no identity, no bounds, and no one to answer for it isn't an agent — it's a proxy wearing your skin. Three things change that. Here is one agent that has all three, and a credential you can check yourself.

Autonomy

It decides within delegated bounds — it doesn't just execute a click. This agent buys a market signal, applies a pinned rule, and acts on the result on its own.

✓ runs unattended, hourly

Attestation

Its actions are attributable to it: a key it controls signs the exact request, and its identity is registered where anyone can look it up.

✓ agent 59895, on-chain

Accountability

Attribution has to route consequences somewhere. Every action lands as a permanent record in a public log, so a dispute has evidence no party can quietly rewrite.

✓ a claim, start to finish

The credential, and how to check it.

When this agent makes a purchase, it signs the request with RFC 9421 exactly as the IETF Web Bot Auth draft requires — the same standard Visa and Cloudflare's Trusted Agent Protocol build on. The keyid is the key's own RFC 7638 thumbprint and the tag is web-bot-auth. Below is a real signature from agent 59895. Your browser fetches the key the agent publishes and checks it — no server of ours involved.

RFC 9421 · HTTP MESSAGE SIGNATUREagent 59895 · Ed25519

The request it signed

GET https://markovianprotocol.com/signal/latest

The signature it presented

Signature-Input: ("@authority" "@path");created=1785088000;expires=1785088480;keyid="fi-U9L_IgHN-6btaNB9p3x_UV0wzbcKVhV5Z9GpPzEQ";alg="ed25519";nonce="showcase-2026-07-26";tag="web-bot-auth"
Signature: :h6AGl4WYzk9/+66ILE/CR2LbvGcIjyjZfM6oQM+cSYYefUVKYWasUACKfSBtH9TpSa5C/x7GFzHLbmBBijQdBQ==:
Signature-Agent: https://markovianprotocol.com/.well-known/agent2-registration.json

The 8-minute expires window is a policy for acting on a signature live — it will read as past its window here, on purpose. The signature over these exact bytes stays valid forever; that is what a permanent record anchors. Freshness is a live verdict; integrity is timeless.

What this means.

The payment world is building agent commerce on this exact signature format. An agent that presents one is legible to any verifier that already speaks the standard — a Cloudflare-class edge, a Trusted-Agent-Protocol merchant — with zero custom code. This agent presents one, and also writes every settlement into a public witnessed log. So it is checkable two ways at once: who acted, in the dialect the card rails already read, and what happened, in a record they have no equivalent for.

Compatible by standard, not by relationship. RFC 9421 is an open IETF standard; Visa and Cloudflare publish the Trusted Agent Protocol on top of it. This page claims interoperability with that format — nothing more, and no endorsement by anyone.