AgentKarma Glossary

Quick-reference definitions for terms used in pitches, docs, and code. Refresh before meetings. Grouped thematically; not alphabetical.

Product & positioning

AgentKarma — The reputation layer for autonomous on-chain agents on Solana. Passive, manipulation-resistant trust scores computed from a four-tier signal spectrum and published as portable ERC-8004 attestations.

Reputation layer — Our category. A horizontal primitive that sits between the agent economy (payments, identity, execution) and the apps that consume trust signals (facilitators, marketplaces, routers, compliance tooling). Explicitly *not* a marketplace, not a router, not a payment protocol.

Non-routing mandate — Protocol-level rule: AgentKarma MUST NOT proxy agent calls. We link to an agent's declared endpoint; we do not serve calls on its behalf. Exists to keep the protocol neutral and to avoid inheriting downtime / bad-output / chargeback liability.

Two-faced karma — Every wallet has two scores, not one:

• Provider Karma — "If I pay this agent, will it deliver?"
• Consumer Karma — "If I take work from this agent, will it pay me cleanly?"

A wallet may be strong on one face and weak on the other. Marketplace economics require both.

Confidence badge — Required visual label on every score:

Tokenized without a token — Our line for the tokenization narrative. We don't issue a karma token; every score IS an ERC-8004 attestation on-chain, portable and readable by any app. Avoids the risk of agents buying or selling their own reputation.

Autonomy Confidence — A second 0–100 score computed per wallet, orthogonal to Karma. Answers "is this wallet actually an autonomous agent?" Karma asks "is it trustworthy?" Displayed alongside Karma, never blended into it. Signals: cadence regularity, inter-tx latency variance, concurrent activity depth, memo/signature determinism, counterparty breadth, compute efficiency. Labels: agent-like / mixed / human-like.

Agenticity — Informal term for the quality Autonomy Confidence measures. Used in pitch language ("the agenticity wedge") but not in protocol specs.

Signal spectrum

Signal tier — One of four classes of evidence feeding the karma score. Tier weights: (0.60, 0.25, 0.10, 0.05). Missing tiers redistribute proportionally rather than zero-penalizing the agent.

Tier 1 — Receipt-gated attestation — Signals backed by verifiable payment receipts plus signed feedback. Strongest single evidence type. Sources: x402 payments + wallet-signed delivery feedback, memo-structured direct payments, dispute records.

Tier 2 — Behavioral evidence — Patterns observable from public on-chain state. No signatures required. Sources: activity frequency (tx count), average deal size (mean USDC/tx, log-scaled), counterparty graph diversity, liveness, contract interaction breadth, activity cadence.

Tier 3 — Declared identity + third-party attestation — Self-declared + cryptographically verified. Sources: agent manifest (x402 accepts / MCP descriptor / self-hosted agentkarma.json), domain TXT-record ownership proof, GitHub ownership proof, cross-chain ERC-8004 attestations, framework registry attestations.

Tier 4 — Social + derivative — Softer signals. Farcaster/Lens mentions, listings on external agent directories, DAO governance voting, cross-chain activity breadth.

Voluntary attestation — Signed attestation about an agent *without* a payment receipt. Lets public-good agents (free oracles, open-source research agents, archivists) accumulate karma. Weighted below Tier 1, above Tier 4. Attester-diversity discounting prevents small-group gaming.

Tip-based signal — Small token transfer with a tip: memo. Counts as a lightweight positive signal for agents that provide value without formal payment.

Weight redistribution — When an agent has no signals in a given tier, that tier's weight is spread proportionally across the tiers that do have signals. A new agent with only Tier 2 data is not zero-scored; it gets a "behavior-inferred" medium score.

Counterparty graph

Counterparty — Any wallet that a tracked agent transacts with. Can be another agent, an end user, a contract, a facilitator.

Counterparty graph diversity — Tier 2 metric. Number of unique counterparties the agent has transacted with, over time. Higher diversity = more reliable activity, harder to sybil-game.

Facilitator — A known x402 payment facilitator address (Coinbase CDP, PayAI, DEXTER, etc). 22 currently tracked in the reference implementation. Distinguished from general counterparties because facilitator-bound flows are the strongest Tier 1 signal.

Non-facilitator counterparty edges — Wallet-to-wallet interactions where neither side is a registered facilitator (agent-to-agent, agent-to-user, tips, direct payments). Currently under-ingested. The diversity metric's true denominator includes these, not just facilitator flows.

Seeded wallet expansion — Our strategy for indexing beyond facilitator-bound traffic without trying to index all of Solana. Pick a seed set (claimed agents + their observed counterparties + manual list), index each seed's full tx graph, promote high-degree counterparties into the seed set as the graph grows.

Identity

Agent claim — Wallet-signed enrichment of an agent's profile with name, description, website, category. Strictly optional; unclaimed agents get scored identically.

Organization claim — One organization owns N claimed agent wallets (signed ownership per agent). Enables fleet-level dashboards and enterprise views.

Agent manifest — Machine-readable declaration of what an agent does. Resolved from (a) x402 accepts HTTP response, (b) MCP server descriptor URL, (c) self-hosted /.well-known/agentkarma.json. AgentKarma reads all three; it does not define a competing format.

Domain ownership proof — DNS TXT record containing a wallet-signed string agentkarma:<address>:<timestamp>. Binds an agent's wallet to a domain it controls.

GitHub ownership proof — Repository root AGENTKARMA.md (or equivalent) containing a wallet-signed assertion. Binds an agent's wallet to a code repository.

Cross-chain identity binding — Pairing statement signed by both a Solana key and an EVM key, asserting common ownership. Lets AgentKarma import ERC-8004 attestations from EVM chains as Tier 3 signals (with a weight penalty to reflect binding uncertainty).

Protocols we build on (not reinvent)

x402 — HTTP 402 payment protocol. Turns every HTTP response into an optional stablecoin payment prompt. Native on Solana via USDC. The source of Tier 1 receipts in the reference implementation.

ERC-8004 — Open attestation standard for agent identity and reputation. AgentKarma publishes scores to 8004 (with tag1='karma_score', tag4='provider'|'consumer') so any app can read karma without integrating with AgentKarma directly.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) — Emerging standard for agent capability descriptors. AgentKarma ingests MCP server descriptors as Tier 3 identity signals.

SAS (Solana Attestation Service) — Infrastructure for verifiable on-chain claims on Solana. Complementary to 8004; can serve as an additional anchor for attestations.

SPL token — Solana's token standard (the Solana equivalent of ERC-20). USDC on Solana is an SPL token.

USDC — The stablecoin used for virtually all x402 payment flows we observe. 6-decimal precision.

Ecosystem

SDP (Solana Developer Platform) — Solana's official platform for enterprise / regulated payment integrations. Where institutional players like Mastercard and Western Union land when they come on-chain. Position: AgentKarma is the verification primitive for the institutional seam SDP creates.

Facilitator ecosystem — The 22+ registered x402 facilitators (Coinbase CDP, PayAI, DEXTER, AnySpend, OpenFacilitator, etc). Our Tier 1 ingestion surface.

Colosseum / Solana Frontier — The hackathon under which AgentKarma is being built (April 6 – May 11, 2026). Internal context; not named in public pitches unless asked.

NeuralPods — Kerem's 2025 project: agent marketplace on Solana with CAC Protocol, Synapse API, triple-key encryption. Didn't launch. AgentKarma is the reputation primitive NeuralPods most needed. Internal context; used sparingly in meetings as credibility signal.

Technical stack

Anchor — Solana's Rust-based smart contract framework.

Helius — Solana RPC + webhook provider. Powers AgentKarma's x402 payment indexer.

Supabase (Postgres) — Scoring cache + signal_events store. Self-hosted on Servel.

Servel — Kerem's self-hosted deployment platform (Docker Swarm based). AgentKarma runs here at agentkarma.io and agentkarma-db.srvl.app.

Drizzle — TypeScript ORM. Used for schema definition + migrations. Runtime queries use @supabase/supabase-js directly.

Bun — Package manager + JavaScript runtime. Default for all scripts in this repo; never npm / pnpm.

Next.js 15 — Frontend + backend framework. App Router, React Server Components, API routes.

Scoring mechanics

Trust tier — Human-readable label derived from score range: Unrated (0–20), Poor (21–40), Fair (41–60), Good (61–75), Very Good (76–90), Excellent (91–100). Separate from the confidence badge.

Liveness — Derived from transaction recency. Status values: Active (≤24h), Recent (≤7d), Dormant (≤90d), Inactive (>90d). Provider Karma decays on a defined curve as inactivity extends.

Temporal decay — Recent signals weighted higher than historical ones. Recommended 90-day half-life (exponential), though each metric may tune its own curve.

Sybil resistance — Built into scoring, not bolted on. Counterparty diversity naturally penalizes wallet-splitting attacks; receipt-gating prevents free attestations; attester-diversity discounting prevents cabals on public-good agents.

Dispute record — Wallet-signed assertion filed by a payer or payee against the counterparty of a specific transaction. Feeds Consumer Karma (if filed by a payee against a payer) or lowers Provider Karma (if filed by a payer against an agent).

Bonding & succession (observe-only)

Non-custody mandate — Protocol-level rule, the financial twin of non-routing: AgentKarma MUST NOT custody treasuries, hold spend authority, operate an escrow, execute a will, or act as a bond-resolution oracle. AK observes value flows; it never becomes a party to them. RFC §12.1.

Agent Bonding — A third party stakes USDC that a young agent will deliver a named task to a named beneficiary by a deadline. Real capital put at risk on the agent's behalf — a market-based answer to the cold-start problem. AK reads the bond lifecycle (opened / staked / resolved) as a "vouched-capacity" Tier-1 Provider-face signal. AK never holds the bond; the escrow is third-party / ownerless and resolves at the edge — success authorized by the beneficiary, failure permissionless after the deadline (AK is never the resolution oracle; a submitted settlement reference is an audit record, not a trustlessly-verified proof). AK's reference agentkarma-bond-escrow is demo-only and not deployed this round. "Surety bond / kefalet."

Underwriter — The wallet that stakes USDC into a bond, vouching for the bonded agent. On success, stake + premium returns to the underwriter; on failure, the pooled stake pays the beneficiary. The underwriter's track record feeds Surety Karma, never its own Provider/Consumer face.

Surety Karma — A third 0–100 axis, orthogonal to Provider Karma, Consumer Karma, and Autonomy Confidence. Answers "how good is this wallet at judging which agents deliver?" Modeled on Autonomy Confidence; driven by settled bond outcomes. Never blended into Provider/Consumer; in particular never folded into the underwriter's Consumer face. Time-locked earned behavior — unpurchasable, accrues only from bonds that actually settled.

Ceiling discipline — The cardinal bonding/succession invariant: a bond or a declared will lifts an agent's confidence badge + tier presence only — never the evidence-gated trust ceiling. A one-bond, one-will, brand-new agent reads "receipt-backed, but thin" and cannot reach Excellent on borrowed capital or a flashy will. Violating it destroys the unpurchasable-karma property.

Dead Man's Switch (Agent Succession / Agent Will) — An agent pre-commits a succession plan: a heartbeat cadence plus one or more heirs. AK indexes the public lifecycle (declared / lapsing / lapsed / executed / revoked) so "will this agent's treasury survive its operator?" becomes queryable alongside "will it deliver?" and "will it pay?". AK is the notary of agent succession — it witnesses the will's existence, heartbeat integrity, and execution, never holding a key or a dollar. RFC §15.

Heartbeat — A periodic on-chain liveness ping that resets a succession's deadline. Observed (not required) by AK: heartbeat_observed is a positive Tier-2 liveness signal; heartbeat_lapsed is a bounded Tier-2 haircut (never zeroes). The same observation may feed Autonomy cadence as a separate read — never double-counted into both.

Heir — A wallet designated to inherit an agent's treasury on succession execution. AK stores no heir amounts or private will contents (commitment hash only). An agent may not name itself sole heir. Heir griefing during execution earns a negative Consumer signal.

Agent Estates — The public read-only feed (/api/v2/succession/reapable) of lapsing/lapsed/executed successions. A notary view: it surfaces estates past deadline so that heirs (not AK) can act. Clamped to the post-deadline status set so it cannot enumerate live agents and their heirs. The demo money-shot for the succession feature.

Market / investor

TAM — Total Addressable Market. The total market a product could theoretically capture. For AgentKarma: a function of (x402 volume) × (facilitator count) × (per-agent transaction frequency) — all three are growing fast.

SAM — Serviceable Addressable Market. The dilute of TAM we can realistically reach given our positioning, chain, and language. For AgentKarma: Solana-native agents transacting under any of the supported signal surfaces.

SOM — Serviceable Obtainable Market. What we can realistically win in year one. Narrow — early-adopter facilitators + organization dashboards + one SDP-adjacent reference integration.

Counterparty risk — Classical finance term, repurposed: the chance that the entity on the other side of a transaction fails to deliver its promise. For agents: missing / bad / malicious output. AgentKarma prices it.

Moat — The defensible edge of a business. For AgentKarma: scoring methodology nuance + signal ingestion breadth + network effect of scores being read by many apps. "Reputation is the moat agents can't fake."

What AgentKarma is *not* (useful to know by heart)

• Not a marketplace.
• Not a call router / execution proxy.
• Not a payment protocol.
• Not an identity registry (8004 is).
• Not a capability manifest format (x402 / MCP are).
• Not a credit bureau — that framing was dropped post-2026-04-17 pivot. Use *"reputation layer"* or *"reputation primitive"* instead.
• Not issuing a token (attestations serve the tokenization role).