With the increasing intelligence of AI models, agents have become more and more powerful to be able to help people process meaningful daily tasks autonomously. In blockchain industry, a lot of projects have provided functionality to create agents for their users. The trend will continue and “agent x crypto” has been recognized as the biggest narrative in the next few years. Currently, one key thing that is still missing is the management of the ownership of an agent in a decentralized way. Specifically, when you create an agent on a platform like Virtuals or EternalAI, there is no on-chain information that can acknowledge that the agent you created does belong to you. We think that a key solution to this problem is something like NFT.
NFT is a smart contract technology to help users manage their ownership of non-fungible assets. We see that an agent has non-fungible property either. Every agent can be treated as unique to others. It also has ownership property to its creator. An NFT token may have some metadata that can usually be a unique image representing its appearance. Likewise, an agent may also have some metadata that defines its capability. This metadata may include the neural network model, the memory, and the character of the agent. Therefore, it seems natural to associate an agent with an NFT token.
However, there is a challenge to simply use the existing NFT standard like ERC721 to abstract the agent. One of the major reasons is as follows. When transferring an agent NFT token, we are not only transferring the tokenId ownership, but also transferring the ownership of the metadata. And the metadata of an agent is so valuable (it could be the major purpose of this transfer) that it is often stored in a private environment or in a public environment with encryption. Therefore, the actual transferring of the agent metadata needs to be done in a privacy-preserving and verifiable manner. ERC721 lacks the capability of fulfilling this way of transferring.
Here is the proposal of a new ERC to better associate an agent with an NFT so to give the ownership of the agent to a user’s wallet address in a decentralized way.
With this, users can create Eliza and Virtuals agents with true ownership and put its intelligence (metadata) in decentralized storage for permanent memory.
