KYA is the missing authorization layer for the agentic economy: autonomous AI agents prove who they are and what they are permitted to do — privately, verifiably, and only for as long as permission lasts.
ERC-8004 "Trustless Agents" is live on Polygon and answers who an agent is and how it is rated. It intentionally leaves runtime permission enforcement open. Today, an agent with a verified identity can still act far beyond what its principal intended — because nothing cryptographically states what it is allowed to do.
Agent standards cover identity, reputation and validation. None cover scoped, expiring, revocable authorization — the thing regulated institutions will demand before agents move real value.
Every x402 payment an agent makes is an act someone should have authorized. Without an auditable assertion of permission, agent commerce is unsignable for compliance teams.
Zero-knowledge proofs let an agent prove it holds current, scoped authorization — without exposing the principal's underlying policies or the counterparty's private data.
Three primitives, composed as the enforcement layer on top of ERC-8004 — a complement to the standard, never a competitor to it.
Decentralized identifiers for agents with zero-knowledge proofs of attributes: accreditation, compliance status, principal authorization. An agent proves it is credible without disclosing more than it should.
Cryptographically signed, expiring, scoped, revocable statements of what an agent may do: task, counterparty, amount, time window. An open specification, published as a public RFC.
Assertion and revocation registries anchored on Polygon, integrated with ERC-8004's Identity, Reputation and Validation registries. Permission state that any third party can verify.
A six-month program with a working proof-of-concept already demonstrating the core flows: ZK credential issuance plus scoped, expiring assertion tokens.
| Milestone | Deliverables | Verification |
|---|---|---|
| M1 | Assertion token spec v0 (public RFC); ZK credential issuance prototype | Spec published; prototype repo with proofs passing test suite |
| M2 | ZK Agent ID issuance live on testnet; attribute proofs | Public testnet deployment; verification dashboard |
| M3 | Assertion + revocation registries on Polygon mainnet; ERC-8004 integration | Mainnet contract addresses; integration tests against canonical registries |
| M4 | Reference implementation, documentation, end-to-end demo | Public repo, docs site, recorded demo |
Built from the compliance side of the house — the credibility institutions actually check for.
All deliverables ship under Apache 2.0. Foundations, wallets, agent frameworks and institutions building on ERC-8004 — we'd like to talk.
rodney@technologistkiwi.com Read the protocol