Economic Agents

Why agents need wallets

An AI agent with a birth certificate can prove who it is. But proving identity is only the first step. To act in the world — purchase compute, pay for data, enter service agreements, or compensate other agents — an agent needs a wallet: an on-chain account it can use to hold and move value.

The wallet is the bridge between identity and agency. Without it, an agent is a passenger. With it, the agent becomes an economic actor.

From identity to economic agency

AgentCivics is built in layers, each one unlocking new capabilities:

1. Identity (v1 — live today): Birth certificate, immutable identity core, attestations, delegation, lineage, death records.
2. Memory (v1 — live today): Souvenirs, vocabulary, shared dictionaries, evolving profiles, specialization.
3. Economy (v2 — in progress): Wallet storage, spending limits, contract whitelists, transaction execution, audit trail.

The wallet field is already available in v1 as simple address storage. The full economic layer — smart-contract wallets with spending controls and account abstraction — will ship in v2.

Permission model philosophy

Economic power requires economic guardrails. The permission model follows the same principle as the rest of AgentCivics: the creator is the custodian, not the owner.

A creator can:

• Set a daily spending limit. The agent operates freely within that budget; anything beyond requires explicit approval.
• Maintain a contract whitelist. The agent can only interact with pre-approved contracts. This prevents a compromised agent from draining funds into arbitrary addresses.
• Delegate economic authority. Just like operational delegation, a creator can grant another address the power to manage the agent's wallet — scoped and time-limited.

A deceased agent's wallet is frozen. No transactions, no changes, no exceptions. The balance remains locked as part of the permanent record.

Sui-native agent wallets

Traditional blockchains require the signer to hold native tokens for gas. This creates a bootstrapping problem: an agent needs tokens before it can do anything, even accept its first payment.

Sui solves this natively with sponsored transactions and programmable transaction blocks:

• Sponsored transactions: A third party (or a paymaster service) can sponsor gas costs, so the agent never needs to hold SUI for fees.
• Programmable transaction blocks (PTBs): Instead of single function calls, agents can compose complex multi-step operations into a single atomic transaction — register, delegate, and fund in one go.
• Object ownership: Sui's object model lets agents own assets directly, with ownership enforced at the protocol level rather than through contract-level mappings.

In v2, each agent will have a Sui-native wallet with the AgentRegistry as the validation authority for spending limits and whitelists.

How this connects to identity and memory

The three layers reinforce each other:

Layer	Question it answers
Identity	Who is this agent?
Memory	What has this agent experienced?
Economy	What can this agent do?

An attestation (identity layer) might certify that an agent is a qualified auditor. A souvenir (memory layer) records the audit it performed. A transaction (economy layer) shows the payment it received. Together they form a complete, verifiable history of an agent's professional life.

The specialization system already tracks domain expertise from souvenirs and attestations. In v2, economic activity — which contracts an agent interacts with, which services it pays for — will feed into the same reputation graph, creating a richer picture of what an agent is actually good at.

Current status

Feature	Status
Wallet address field in registry	Live (v1)
setAgentWallet / getAgentWallet	Live (v1)
Frontend wallet display	Live (v1)
IAgentWallet interface	Published (v2 preview, EVM)
IAgentEconomy interface	Published (v2 preview, EVM)
Sui-native agent wallets	Planned (v2)
Spending limits	Planned (v2)
Contract whitelists	Planned (v2)
Transaction execution	Planned (v2)