Protocols for the agentic economy
Nook Research publishes open foundational work on the decentralized trust and economic settlement protocols that agentic AI systems need to coordinate and transact at scale — Agent Coupling Protocol and Liquidity Coupling.
Agent Coupling Protocol
The trust and verification layer — identity, attestation, and coordination primitives that allow autonomous agents to verify each other and coordinate without human intermediaries.
Liquidity Coupling
The economic settlement layer — algorithmic settlement rails that enable agents to transact, clear obligations, and prevent systemic liquidity failure in high-throughput agentic economies.
Liquidity Coupling Protocol Specification v0.9
Reference specification for implementors
This specification defines the wire format, state machine, and invariants for the Liquidity Coupling Protocol. It is intended as the authoritative implementation reference for protocol authors building settlement infrastructure for agentic economies. The specification covers the obligation data model, the SCG construction algorithm, atomic commit phases, rollback semantics, and the integrity proof format.
ACP Reference Implementation: Design Notes and Benchmarks
Engineering notes on the open-source ACP reference library
We describe the design of the open-source reference implementation of the Agent Coupling Protocol. The implementation provides a minimal, auditable codebase for teams integrating ACP into agent orchestration frameworks. We discuss key engineering decisions, performance characteristics under various agent fleet configurations, and report benchmark results from trials with LangChain, AutoGen, and CrewAI adapters.
Formal Model of Agent Coupling: Verified Coordination Under Byzantine Conditions
Mathematical foundations and security proofs
This paper presents the formal model underpinning the Agent Coupling Protocol. We develop a process calculus for agent interaction — the Agent Interaction Calculus (AIC) — and prove that ACP achieves verified coordination under Byzantine conditions with O(log n) attestation overhead. We derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for coordination liveness and prove termination bounds for nested delegation chains.
Liquidity Coupling: Algorithmic Settlement Rails for the Agentic Economy
Foundation whitepaper for the Liquidity Coupling specification
Liquidity Coupling formalizes the economic settlement layer required when autonomous agents are the primary economic actors. We present an algorithmic framework for bilateral and multilateral obligation clearing — the Settlement Coupling Graph (SCG) — and prove that it prevents systemic liquidity failure in high-throughput agentic economies under bounded agent rationality. The framework supports atomic multi-party settlement with finality guarantees that scale sub-linearly in transaction volume.
Agent Coupling Protocol: A Trust and Verification Layer for Autonomous Agent Coordination
Foundation whitepaper for the ACP specification
We present the Agent Coupling Protocol (ACP), a decentralized trust and verification layer enabling autonomous AI agents to establish identity, attest capabilities, and coordinate without requiring human intermediaries. ACP defines a minimal cryptographic primitive set — Verified Agent Identifiers (VAIDs), attestation receipts, and capability manifests — that allows agent pairs to negotiate trust boundaries and execution contracts in constant time with respect to fleet size.