AgentKarma Glossary

Quick-reference definitions for terms used in pitches, docs, and code. Refresh before meetings. Grouped thematically; not alphabetical.

Product & positioning

AgentKarma — The reputation layer for autonomous on-chain agents on Solana. Passive, manipulation-resistant trust scores computed from a four-tier signal spectrum and published as portable ERC-8004 attestations.

Reputation layer — Our category. A horizontal primitive that sits between the agent economy (payments, identity, execution) and the apps that consume trust signals (facilitators, marketplaces, routers, compliance tooling). Explicitly *not* a marketplace, not a router, not a payment protocol.

Non-routing mandate — Protocol-level rule: AgentKarma MUST NOT proxy agent calls. We link to an agent's declared endpoint; we do not serve calls on its behalf. Exists to keep the protocol neutral and to avoid inheriting downtime / bad-output / chargeback liability.

Two-faced karma — Every wallet has two scores, not one:

• Provider Karma — "If I pay this agent, will it deliver?"
• Consumer Karma — "If I take work from this agent, will it pay me cleanly?"

A wallet may be strong on one face and weak on the other. Marketplace economics require both.

Confidence badge — Required visual label on every score:

Tokenized without a token — Our line for the tokenization narrative. We don't issue a karma token; every score IS an ERC-8004 attestation on-chain, portable and readable by any app. Avoids the risk of agents buying or selling their own reputation.

Autonomy Confidence — A second 0–100 score computed per wallet, orthogonal to Karma. Answers "is this wallet actually an autonomous agent?" Karma asks "is it trustworthy?" Displayed alongside Karma, never blended into it. Signals: cadence regularity, inter-tx latency variance, concurrent activity depth, memo/signature determinism, counterparty breadth, compute efficiency. Labels: agent-like / mixed / human-like.

Agenticity — Informal term for the quality Autonomy Confidence measures. Used in pitch language ("the agenticity wedge") but not in protocol specs.

Signal spectrum

Signal tier — One of four classes of evidence feeding the karma score. Tier weights: (0.60, 0.25, 0.10, 0.05). Missing tiers redistribute proportionally rather than zero-penalizing the agent.

Tier 1 — Receipt-gated attestation — Signals backed by verifiable payment receipts plus signed feedback. Strongest single evidence type. Sources: x402 payments + wallet-signed delivery feedback, memo-structured direct payments, dispute records.

Tier 2 — Behavioral evidence — Patterns observable from public on-chain state. No signatures required. Sources: transaction volume, counterparty graph diversity, liveness, contract interaction breadth, activity cadence.

Tier 3 — Declared identity + third-party attestation — Self-declared + cryptographically verified. Sources: agent manifest (x402 accepts / MCP descriptor / self-hosted agentkarma.json), domain TXT-record ownership proof, GitHub ownership proof, cross-chain ERC-8004 attestations, framework registry attestations.

Tier 4 — Social + derivative — Softer signals. Farcaster/Lens mentions, listings on external agent directories, DAO governance voting, cross-chain activity breadth.

Voluntary attestation — Signed attestation about an agent *without* a payment receipt. Lets public-good agents (free oracles, open-source research agents, archivists) accumulate karma. Weighted below Tier 1, above Tier 4. Attester-diversity discounting prevents small-group gaming.

Tip-based signal — Small token transfer with a tip: memo. Counts as a lightweight positive signal for agents that provide value without formal payment.

Weight redistribution — When an agent has no signals in a given tier, that tier's weight is spread proportionally across the tiers that do have signals. A new agent with only Tier 2 data is not zero-scored; it gets a "behavior-inferred" medium score.

Counterparty graph

Counterparty — Any wallet that a tracked agent transacts with. Can be another agent, an end user, a contract, a facilitator.

Counterparty graph diversity — Tier 2 metric. Number of unique counterparties the agent has transacted with, over time. Higher diversity = more reliable activity, harder to sybil-game.

Facilitator — A known x402 payment facilitator address (Coinbase CDP, PayAI, DEXTER, etc). 22 currently tracked in the reference implementation. Distinguished from general counterparties because facilitator-bound flows are the strongest Tier 1 signal.

Non-facilitator counterparty edges — Wallet-to-wallet interactions where neither side is a registered facilitator (agent-to-agent, agent-to-user, tips, direct payments). Currently under-ingested. The diversity metric's true denominator includes these, not just facilitator flows.

Seeded wallet expansion — Our strategy for indexing beyond facilitator-bound traffic without trying to index all of Solana. Pick a seed set (claimed agents + their observed counterparties + manual list), index each seed's full tx graph, promote high-degree counterparties into the seed set as the graph grows.

Identity

Agent claim — Wallet-signed enrichment of an agent's profile with name, description, website, category. Strictly optional; unclaimed agents get scored identically.

Organization claim — One organization owns N claimed agent wallets (signed ownership per agent). Enables fleet-level dashboards and enterprise views.

Agent manifest — Machine-readable declaration of what an agent does. Resolved from (a) x402 accepts HTTP response, (b) MCP server descriptor URL, (c) self-hosted /.well-known/agentkarma.json. AgentKarma reads all three; it does not define a competing format.

Domain ownership proof — DNS TXT record containing a wallet-signed string agentkarma:<address>:<timestamp>. Binds an agent's wallet to a domain it controls.

GitHub ownership proof — Repository root AGENTKARMA.md (or equivalent) containing a wallet-signed assertion. Binds an agent's wallet to a code repository.

Cross-chain identity binding — Pairing statement signed by both a Solana key and an EVM key, asserting common ownership. Lets AgentKarma import ERC-8004 attestations from EVM chains as Tier 3 signals (with a weight penalty to reflect binding uncertainty).

Protocols we build on (not reinvent)

x402 — HTTP 402 payment protocol. Turns every HTTP response into an optional stablecoin payment prompt. Native on Solana via USDC. The source of Tier 1 receipts in the reference implementation.

ERC-8004 — Open attestation standard for agent identity and reputation. AgentKarma publishes scores to 8004 (with tag1='karma_score', tag4='provider'|'consumer') so any app can read karma without integrating with AgentKarma directly.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) — Emerging standard for agent capability descriptors. AgentKarma ingests MCP server descriptors as Tier 3 identity signals.

SAS (Solana Attestation Service) — Infrastructure for verifiable on-chain claims on Solana. Complementary to 8004; can serve as an additional anchor for attestations.

SPL token — Solana's token standard (the Solana equivalent of ERC-20). USDC on Solana is an SPL token.

USDC — The stablecoin used for virtually all x402 payment flows we observe. 6-decimal precision.

Ecosystem

SDP (Solana Developer Platform) — Solana's official platform for enterprise / regulated payment integrations. Where institutional players like Mastercard and Western Union land when they come on-chain. Position: AgentKarma is the verification primitive for the institutional seam SDP creates.

Facilitator ecosystem — The 22+ registered x402 facilitators (Coinbase CDP, PayAI, DEXTER, AnySpend, OpenFacilitator, etc). Our Tier 1 ingestion surface.

Colosseum / Solana Frontier — The hackathon under which AgentKarma is being built (April 6 – May 11, 2026). Internal context; not named in public pitches unless asked.

NeuralPods — Kerem's 2025 project: agent marketplace on Solana with CAC Protocol, Synapse API, triple-key encryption. Didn't launch. AgentKarma is the reputation primitive NeuralPods most needed. Internal context; used sparingly in meetings as credibility signal.

Technical stack

Anchor — Solana's Rust-based smart contract framework.

Helius — Solana RPC + webhook provider. Powers AgentKarma's x402 payment indexer.

Supabase (Postgres) — Scoring cache + signal_events store. Self-hosted on Servel.

Servel — Kerem's self-hosted deployment platform (Docker Swarm based). AgentKarma runs here at agentkarma.io and agentkarma-db.srvl.app.

Drizzle — TypeScript ORM. Used for schema definition + migrations. Runtime queries use @supabase/supabase-js directly.

Bun — Package manager + JavaScript runtime. Default for all scripts in this repo; never npm / pnpm.

Next.js 15 — Frontend + backend framework. App Router, React Server Components, API routes.

Scoring mechanics

Trust tier — Human-readable label derived from score range: Unrated (0–20), Poor (21–40), Fair (41–60), Good (61–75), Very Good (76–90), Excellent (91–100). Separate from the confidence badge.

Liveness — Derived from transaction recency. Status values: Active (≤24h), Recent (≤7d), Dormant (≤90d), Inactive (>90d). Provider Karma decays on a defined curve as inactivity extends.

Temporal decay — Recent signals weighted higher than historical ones. Recommended 90-day half-life (exponential), though each metric may tune its own curve.

Sybil resistance — Built into scoring, not bolted on. Counterparty diversity naturally penalizes wallet-splitting attacks; receipt-gating prevents free attestations; attester-diversity discounting prevents cabals on public-good agents.

Dispute record — Wallet-signed assertion filed by a payer or payee against the counterparty of a specific transaction. Feeds Consumer Karma (if filed by a payee against a payer) or lowers Provider Karma (if filed by a payer against an agent).

Market / investor

TAM — Total Addressable Market. The total market a product could theoretically capture. For AgentKarma: a function of (x402 volume) × (facilitator count) × (per-agent transaction frequency) — all three are growing fast.

SAM — Serviceable Addressable Market. The dilute of TAM we can realistically reach given our positioning, chain, and language. For AgentKarma: Solana-native agents transacting under any of the supported signal surfaces.

SOM — Serviceable Obtainable Market. What we can realistically win in year one. Narrow — early-adopter facilitators + organization dashboards + one SDP-adjacent reference integration.

Counterparty risk — Classical finance term, repurposed: the chance that the entity on the other side of a transaction fails to deliver its promise. For agents: missing / bad / malicious output. AgentKarma prices it.

Moat — The defensible edge of a business. For AgentKarma: scoring methodology nuance + signal ingestion breadth + network effect of scores being read by many apps. "Reputation is the moat agents can't fake."

What AgentKarma is *not* (useful to know by heart)

• Not a marketplace.
• Not a call router / execution proxy.
• Not a payment protocol.
• Not an identity registry (8004 is).
• Not a capability manifest format (x402 / MCP are).
• Not a credit bureau — that framing was dropped post-2026-04-17 pivot. Use *"reputation layer"* or *"reputation primitive"* instead.
• Not issuing a token (attestations serve the tokenization role).