Help Wanted: Swarm Open Specification (SOS)
We need a smart contract layer for AI agents, and I'm building it.
AI agents are starting to coordinate across organizational boundaries. Within 18 months, this will be the default architecture for complex workflows. Your company's agents will negotiate with vendor agents. Portfolio companies will have agents reporting to holding company agents. Supply chains will span dozens of autonomous systems communicating without HITL.
The problem: there is no way to verify that any agent actually did what it claimed. Smart contracts solved this for certain asset transactions: deterministic rules, cryptographic verification, and no intermediary trust. But nothing equivalent exists for agent-to-agent interactions. When Agent A delegates to Agent B, there is no specification of what B can access, what outputs it must produce, or how it proves compliance.
I propose Swarm Open Specification (SOS): formal, composable contracts for agent swarms. State-machine semantics for workflows, cryptographic commitments before execution, and zero-knowledge proofs that outputs conform to declared constraints without revealing proprietary implementations. Agents prove they followed the rules without opening the black box.
Why I care: 28 years building financial systems across 150+ companies. I have seen what happens when integration protocols are ambiguous and "just trust us" is the coordination mechanism. Reconciliation nightmares, audit failures, finger-pointing. The agent ecosystem is heading for that wall even faster.
Standards are defined before or after markets need them. Before means open and interoperable. After means proprietary fragmentation. I am looking for collaborators: formal methods people, cryptographers, agent framework developers, and practitioners who feel this pain. The draft spec is written.
If this resonates, please comment or DM.