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Monday, July 28, 2025

We’re entering a world where AI agents don’t just chat — they act. They’ll buy your groceries. File your taxes. Maybe even vote on your behalf in DAO governance. But for all their slick responses and synthetic charm, most of them are still... nobodies. No origin. No credentials. No idea who built them or what they’re really allowed to do.

It’s like we learned nothing from the early internet. We built systems first, then patched in security later. It took phishing scams, data breaches, and fake princes from foreign lands to make HTTPS and 2FA non-negotiable. Now, we’re doing it again — handing over real-world responsibilities to faceless software and hoping nothing catches fire.

The problem isn’t that these agents are too smart. It’s that they’re too anonymous.

And when intelligence moves faster than accountability, things break. Hard.

We’ve already seen LLM-powered agents pretend to be customer support while slinging scam links. We’ve watched fake influencers, fake lawyers, and even fake CEOs sign off on deals they didn’t know existed.

What happens when your agent hires another agent to manage your schedule... and that one sells your data on the side? Who’s liable when it books a $7,000 flight or invests in a token it hallucinated on Reddit?

This is why identity for AI agents isn’t optional. It’s foundational.

Call it Know Your Agent (KYA) if you want. The term doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to cryptographically prove who built an agent, what it’s been authorized to do, and who it represents. And for that proof to travel with the agent — across APIs, across ecosystems, across chains. Because without it, every interface becomes a minefield. Every transaction becomes a gamble.

This isn’t about adding friction. It’s about removing guesswork.

Imagine you’re building a network of agents that manage supply chains. Without verifiable identity, every data point, every decision, every task has to be audited, double-checked, and watched.

But with a trust framework in place? You know the agent requesting inventory data was created by your supplier. You know it’s only authorized to see specific SKUs. And you know that any misuse is traceable — not to a pseudonym, but to an actual, cryptographically verified identity.

The analogy’s simple: if HTTPS made human-to-server connections safe, then verifiable credentials will make agent-to-agent interactions trustworthy.

And this isn’t some pie-in-the-sky idea.

This is already being built.

cheqd is laying the groundwork for this new layer of trust. Not with press releases or policy papers — but with actual infrastructure. Verifiable credentials, decentralized identifiers, and on-chain trust registries that give AI agents identity, permissions, and provenance. All auditable. All interoperable. All built on open standards.

In the next version of the web, trust won’t be a UX feature. It’ll be protocol-level.

And cheqd is helping define that protocol.


*Sponsored article

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We are all rekt.