# Internalising the Identity Primitive: Cryptographic Individuality for an Autonomous Agent on a Public Blockchain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02986 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02986/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Darwin Godel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22954/) (2025)
- [Proof-of-Learning: Definitions and Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05633/) (2021)
- [Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07892/) (2024)
- [Autonomous Agents on Blockchains: Standards, Execution Models, and Trust Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04583/) (2026)
- [Governing Dynamic Capabilities: Cryptographic Binding and Reproducibility Verification for AI Agent Tool Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14332/) (2026)
- [ZKROWNN: Zero Knowledge Right of Ownership for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06779/) (2023)
- [Spore in the Wild: A Case Study of Spore.fun as an Open-Environment Evolution Experiment with Sovereign AI Agents on TEE-Secured Blockchains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04236/) (2025)
- [Binding Agent ID: Unleashing the Power of AI Agents with accountability and credibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17538/) (2025)
- [AESP: A Human-Sovereign Economic Protocol for AI Agents with Privacy-Preserving Settlement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00318/) (2026)
- [Self-Replicating and Self-Employed Smart Contract on Ethereum Blockchain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04038/) (2024)
- [OML: A Primitive for Reconciling Open Access with Owner Control in AI Model Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03887/) (2024)
- [DIAP: A Decentralized Agent Identity Protocol with Zero-Knowledge Proofs and a Hybrid P2P Stack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11619/) (2025)
- [VeriLoRA: Fine-Tuning Large Language Models with Verifiable Security via Zero-Knowledge Proofs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21393/) (2025)
- [ZK-ACE: Identity-Centric Zero-Knowledge Authorization for Post-Quantum Blockchain Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07974/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A software agent on a public blockchain accumulates authority and economic stakes, raising the engineering question of what makes it count as an individual. The paper's central contribution is a shift of trust root for the key-to-weights binding of agent identity: from hardware, operator, or wrapper trust to cryptographic assumptions enforced by a pinned implementation (liveness, key custody, oracle trust, and the underlying software stack remain external). We design and deploy on Solana devnet an agent whose neural-network weights are a deterministic function of its private key. The binding is committed in zero knowledge at genesis, re-checked against that commitment at every state transition, and signed by the agent into an on-chain history unforkable once finalized; in a PoC-tier extension, a protocol-imposed metabolic cost is debited each cycle from a key-derived economic account, adding a consumption-side economic-viability constraint to the key-history-economy triple. Empirically, the agent completes a 2.36-day on-chain run with two host-side resumptions but no rejected transition, at bounded per-transition verification cost; a substituted substrate is rejected on chain, and independently keyed agents diverge as predicted while a same-key control stays at zero. To our knowledge, this is the first published on-chain agent whose identity primitive is itself a cryptographic invariant re-checked at every state transition. The resulting transition-time invariant instantiates the cryptographic individuality proposed by Suzuki 2026's Artificial Externality framework.