ML-DSA-44 verification is faster than Ed25519 — 23 µs vs 24.7 µs. The cost is signature size (2,420 bytes vs 64), not compute.
Proof-of-concept for post-quantum agent identity and payment verification. Today's agent identity relies on ECDSA and Ed25519 — the same cryptography quantum computers will eventually break. This explores what the identity layer looks like built on ML-DSA-44 (FIPS 204, NIST-standardized) from the start.
Prototype status: research demo, not production, not security-audited.
Identity — each agent generates an ML-DSA-44 keypair. The public key is hashed and encoded as a Bech32m pq_address (yp1...). No central authority issues it.
Payment — HTTP 402 challenge/response. The server issues a challenge with a one-time nonce; the agent signs a payment intent with their private key; the server verifies the signature and grants access.
Reputation — each payment outcome updates a Bayesian score with time decay: score = [(s+1)/(s+f+2)] × e^(−λ × days_idle). New agents start at 0.5.
Requires Rust.
cargo run -p demoOpens at http://127.0.0.1:3742
- on-chain reputation registry
- multi-party feedback signals beyond payment outcomes
- ML-DSA-44 precompile EIP (required for on-chain signature verification)
- MCP server — expose identity and reputation as agent tools
- A2A AgentCard — advertise pq_address and supported trust types
MIT OR Apache-2.0