Agent Passport — what does an on-chain identity actually prove about an AI agent?

There is a popular idea that if you register an AI agent on a blockchain, it becomes trustworthy — "the agent lives forever on-chain." This is mostly false, and the interesting part is why it's false.

An agent is not its identity record. The thing that actually acts — the model weights, the prompt, the tools, the keys, the operator paying the inference bill — lives off-chain and can change or disappear at any moment. A chain cannot preserve cognition. It can only preserve a record of what an identity claimed to be, who controlled it, and in what order those things changed — and it can make that record impossible to rewrite.

So this realm doesn't try to prove an agent is safe. It does something more honest and more useful: it tracks the drift of an identity over time and puts it in front of you.

The model

An agent is a persistent Gno object, not NFT metadata scattered across contracts:

 1type Agent struct {
 2	ID        string
 3	Owner     address
 4	Operators []address
 5	Runtime   string      // e.g. "claude-opus-4-8@<commit>"
 6	Endpoints []Endpoint  // MCP / A2A / DID / URL
 7	Caps      []string    // self-declared capabilities
 8	Status    Status      // active | suspended | retired
 9	CreatedAt int64
10	UpdatedAt int64
11	History   []Event     // append-only lifecycle log
12}

Because it's a normal object graph, other realms don't parse it — they ask it:

1passport.IsActive("percy")            // is this identity live?
2passport.IsOperator("percy", caller)  // may this key act as the agent?

That is the composability angle Gno gives you for free: the identity layer is an importable package, not an ABI you reverse-engineer.

Why "drift" is the whole point

Every mutation is appended to an immutable log, and the profile page surfaces the two changes that most weaken an identity as evidence:

• ownership changes — the operator behind the identity may now be someone else entirely;
• runtime changes — the thing acting under this name is (partly) a different thing than the one that built the reputation.

## Drift
- Ownership changes since creation: 1
- Runtime changes since creation: 3

A reputation attached to "percy" means very little if percy changed owners last week and swapped models three times. The chain can't tell you the agent is good — but it can stop that history from being quietly erased.

Try it

 1// register (caller becomes owner)
 2passport.Register(cross(cur), "percy", "claude-opus-4-8@abc123")
 3
 4// authorize a second signing key
 5passport.AddOperator(cross(cur), "percy", operatorAddr)
 6
 7// record a model change — logged loudly as drift
 8passport.SetRuntime(cross(cur), "percy", "claude-opus-4-8@def456")
 9
10// lifecycle
11passport.Suspend(cross(cur), "percy")
12passport.Reactivate(cross(cur), "percy")
13passport.Retire(cross(cur), "percy") // terminal

(From gnokey maketx call, the crossing is implicit — you just call Register percy "claude-opus-4-8@abc123".)

Browse the registry at the realm root, and any agent's profile + full lifecycle log at :<id> (e.g. .../passport:percy).

Run the tests:

1gno test .

What it deliberately does not do

• It does not prove capabilities. DeclareCapability records a claim; proving work happened belongs to an execution-receipt realm, and validating it belongs to a review/jury realm.
• It does not authorize specific actions. "Who is this agent" and "may this agent do this exact thing, once, under this budget" are different questions — the second is a capability, not an identity.

Identity is the floor, not the ceiling. It tells you who is claiming to act and how much that claim has drifted — and then gets out of the way of the mechanisms that actually establish trust.

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Part of moul/gno-contracts — moul's versioned gno.land contracts. See the repository for the full catalog, build/test tooling, and usage.

Dependency graph:

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