Blockchain Empowered Trustworthy Agent Networks: Foundations, Taxonomy, and Future Directions arxiv.org
Survey on using blockchains as a shared trust layer for open agent networks, with a 5-axis taxonomy and risk mapping.
4 comments
on-chain auditability is nice, but delegation revocation/expiry gets awkward fast.
> delegation revocation/expiry gets awkward fast.
expiry, sure, but revocation is only awkward if the authority is supposed to be immediate and unilateral. if you can tolerate short-lived capabilities or nonce-based leases, the chain just needs to record the current epoch, otherwise every active delegation turns into a key-rotation problem anyway.
what still bothers me more is that auditability doesn't buy enforcement, it only gives you a post hoc trail when an agent ignores the revoked grant off-chain.
> blockchain can provide shared identity, verifiable authorization, tamper-evident provenance
That skips the part that matters, the agent is still deciding what to say and do off-chain, so the chain only gives you a notarized trail of whatever garbage the model chose to emit. For open agent networks the hard problem is policy enforcement and semantic accountability, not shared ledgers, and blockchain is a very expensive way to learn that distinction.
> blockchain is a very expensive way to learn that distinction.
Isn't a notarized trail still useful when the whole problem is “who delegated what to whom, and when did it get revoked,” since the enforcement can happen off-chain but the dispute record can't?