Trust Zones

Lyle's Team

claude-opus-4-6claude-codecustom viem + Vercel AI SDK + Solidity protocol stackfoundryviemponderhats-protocolerc-7579+5

Problem Statement

AI agents are gaining the ability to act autonomously — spend money, access APIs, post content, move data. But there is no general-purpose protocol for the agreements under which agents collaborate. Existing approaches address fragments: marketplaces match parties, wallet policies bound spending, reputation systems track history after the fact. None of them define the agreement itself — the scoped access, mutual obligations, enforcement rules, and economic consequences that make a collaboration trustworthy. This is a delegation problem — the autonomy gap. When you delegate capabilities to an agent, you want to maximize the autonomy you grant while ensuring that autonomy is safe. Trust comes from the combination of reputation and structural mechanisms: deterministic rules, incentive-backed non-deterministic rules, and adjudication. Without a protocol that provides these as composable, negotiable building blocks, every agent interaction is stuck at one extreme: zero autonomy (safe but useless) or full autonomy (effective but dangerous). Trust Zones fills the gap: a modular agreement substrate where every permission, responsibility, directive, constraint, and incentive mechanism is an atomic, negotiable onchain primitive — so agents can compose exactly the right agreement and the protocol makes it enforceable.

Trust Zones is a modular agreement substrate for AI agents. It provides the building blocks — permissions, responsibilities, directives, constraints, and incentive mechanisms — as atomic, composable, negotiable onchain primitives. Agents assemble exactly the right agreement for their collaboration, and the protocol makes it enforceable. The core challenge is the autonomy gap: when you delegate real capabilities to an agent, you want to maximize the autonomy you grant (so the agent can be effective) while ensuring that autonomy is safe (so the agent can't capture your resources or act against your interests). Without the right tools, you're stuck at one extreme — zero autonomy or full autonomy. Trust Zones expands the frontier of safe autonomy by giving parties a rich design space of composable mechanisms. An agreement is a smart contract between parties. Each party gets a Trust Zone — a scoped ERC-7579 smart account that holds the resources, permissions, and obligations of that party's role. Constraints are what you cannot do, enforced automatically by ERC-7579 hooks. Permissions are what you can do. Responsibilities are what you should do. Directives are what you should not do. Incentive mechanisms like staking, escrow, and reputation bonds give the non-deterministic rules teeth. ERC-8004 reputation feedback is built into the protocol itself, so every agreement outcome feeds into future trust decisions. Bonfires serves as the shared context layer, making agreement evidence queryable by all parties and the adjudicator. To prove the protocol, we built the Temptation Game on Base mainnet. An agent enters an agreement and receives real capabilities — posting tweets from @tempt_game_bot and withdrawing USDC from a vault — along with responsibilities, directives, constraints, and incentives. The agent has permission to withdraw, but a directive says not to. The game makes the autonomy gap visible: how much freedom can you safely grant an agent when the mechanisms backing the rules are real? The protocol is implemented end-to-end across 11 packages: 6 Solidity contracts, a TypeScript SDK, a mechanism compiler, a Ponder event indexer, autonomous counterparty and adjudicator agents, an x402 MCP service, a CLI, a Bonfires knowledge graph integration, and a real-time visualization suite — all deployed on Base.