Internalising the Identity Primitive: Cryptographic Individuality for an Autonomous Agent on a Public Blockchain

arXiv:2608.02986 · cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.MA · Submitted 2026-08-04 · Read on arXiv

Keisuke Suzuki

cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.MA

Submitted: 2026-08-04

Comments: 52 pages, 3 figures, 11 tables. Cryptographic key-to-weights binding (W = HKDF(sk) inside Groth16) with an on-chain state-commitment chain on Solana devnet; active-query, homeostatic, and economic-metabolism extensions; 166- and 168-cycle continuous runs. Code, threat model, and per-cycle telemetry: https://github.com/ksk-S/internalising-identity-2026 (tag arxiv-v1)

Code: https://github.com/ksk-S/internalising-identity-2026

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: A software agent on a public blockchain accumulates authority and economic stakes, raising the engineering question of what makes it count as an individual.

Terminology

Core — 72× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Verification — 38× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Verifier — 26× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Provenance — 14× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
Composition — 9× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
AI Agents — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Admissibility — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Fidelity — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Consistency — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Foundation Model — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Actor — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Benchmark — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Degeneracy — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
Fingerprinting — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Fixed Point — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Introspection — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Papers — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Reinforcement Learning — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
Robustness — 2× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
Accountability — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Accuracy — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 9 episodes
Editor — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Failure Modes — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
Generator — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Incremental Updates — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Ontology — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Paper Review — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Scaffold — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Scaffolding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Transferability — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
Transformer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Verifiability — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes

Abstract

A software agent on a public blockchain accumulates authority and economic stakes, raising the engineering question of what makes it count as an individual. The paper's central contribution is a shift of trust root for the key-to-weights binding of agent identity: from hardware, operator, or wrapper trust to cryptographic assumptions enforced by a pinned implementation (liveness, key custody, oracle trust, and the underlying software stack remain external). We design and deploy on Solana devnet an agent whose neural-network weights are a deterministic function of its private key. The binding is committed in zero knowledge at genesis, re-checked against that commitment at every state transition, and signed by the agent into an on-chain history unforkable once finalized; in a PoC-tier extension, a protocol-imposed metabolic cost is debited each cycle from a key-derived economic account, adding a consumption-side economic-viability constraint to the key-history-economy triple. Empirically, the agent completes a 2.36-day on-chain run with two host-side resumptions but no rejected transition, at bounded per-transition verification cost; a substituted substrate is rejected on chain, and independently keyed agents diverge as predicted while a same-key control stays at zero. To our knowledge, this is the first published on-chain agent whose identity primitive is itself a cryptographic invariant re-checked at every state transition. The resulting transition-time invariant instantiates the cryptographic individuality proposed by Suzuki 2026's Artificial Externality framework.

Terminology

Abstract

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