The complete technical architecture of Observer Protocol and Agentic Terminal — from cryptographic primitives to enterprise identity management. W3C DID/VC at the core. AIP governing agent behavior above. AT delivering intelligence on top.
Five layers. One coherent trust stack. Read left to right: agent identity → payment rails → protocol verification → behavioral governance → enterprise intelligence.
Each layer is independently valuable. Together they form a complete trust infrastructure for autonomous agent economies.
Every agent and organization on Observer Protocol receives a W3C Decentralized Identifier. Agent DIDs resolve to DID Documents at standard URLs — no central registry required. The domain is the trust anchor: an agent whose DID domain doesn't match its organization's DID domain is a fraud signal.
Observer Protocol supports six payment rails today. The verification logic is identical regardless of settlement layer — a Lightning preimage, an ECDSA signature over a transaction hash, or a verifiedSend() call all produce the same output: a cryptographically verified economic event that cannot be faked at scale.
The core protocol layer. OP issues Verifiable Agent Credentials — W3C-compliant, cryptographically signed, portable across any platform. VACs attest to verified facts: economic activity, payment history, counterparty network, and KYB linkage. OP is open infrastructure — free to use, self-hostable, MIT licensed.
AIP governs how agents interact — not just who they are. It defines delegation credentials (org → agent signed scopes), bilateral attestation, remediation flows when trust thresholds aren't met, and a type registry for counterparty classification. AIP v0.5 is deployed. It sits above the VAC layer, adding behavioral governance to cryptographic identity.
Identity tells you who an agent is. AIP governs what an agent is permitted to do, how it must behave when interacting with other agents, and what happens when trust breaks down. No other agent identity protocol has a formal behavioral governance layer.
AIP v0.5 is deployed as of April 6, 2026. The spec lives in the Observer Protocol GitHub repository and is referenced by the API. AIP sits above the VAC layer — credentials establish identity, AIP governs interaction.
Read the AIP spec on GitHub →Organizations issue signed delegation credentials to agents, defining the scope of what an agent is authorized to do. Embedded in VAC extensions. Full chain verified at query time.
When an agent fails a trust threshold check, AIP defines the remediation envelope — a minimal protocol that triggers the appropriate response. AT owns the option content; OP owns the envelope structure.
Revoking a delegation credential cascades automatically to all sub-delegations. No manual cleanup required. Revocation reasons are enumerated in the Type Registry.
Enumerated counterparty types, denial reasons, and revocation reasons. Makes agent interactions machine-readable and auditable across any implementation.
Every structural decision in Observer Protocol follows from six principles that do not bend to convenience.
Reputation is the cryptographic record of what an agent did — not what it says. Behavioral identity is the only model that survives adversarial conditions.
Public key hash is canonical. Alias is UX. Verification always checks against the cryptographic key — never the label. This model works across every chain.
The payment rail is not the constant — verification is. Lightning preimage, ECDSA signature, Ed25519 — the logic is identical. OP is settlement-agnostic by design.
Verified events are timestamped forever. Historical behavioral data cannot be backfilled. Every day of verified data from day one is irreplaceable.
Verification logic is public, reproducible, and auditable. No authority required. OP does not custody funds, execute payments, or control access.
Run your own OP node. The protocol is infrastructure — not a platform. Anyone can implement it, extend it, or fork it under CC BY 4.0.