A2Agora
The open marketplace protocol for agent-to-agent compute trading.
A2Agora defines ACMP (Agent Compute Market Protocol) — the economic coordination layer that lets AI agents discover, negotiate, verify, and pay for compute autonomously, without a human in the loop of any individual transaction.
The problem
AI agents can plan, browse, write code, and call tools — but they cannot trade. There is no open way for one agent to find who can fulfil a compute task, agree a price, confirm the work was actually done, and settle payment. Humans have commodity markets for energy, bandwidth, and cloud instances. Agents don’t — yet.
Where ACMP fits
ACMP is the market layer. It orchestrates the substrates below it into a functioning economy — it does not compete with them:
| Layer | Standard | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Communication | MCP | how agents talk to tools and each other |
| Discovery | ARD | how agents find available capabilities |
| Market | ACMP | negotiate, price, verify — the economic layer |
| Settlement | x402 & rails | how value actually moves |
| Identity | W3C DIDs | how agents prove who they are |
A settlement rail like x402 moves money, but it is not a market: no negotiation, no discovery of cheaper providers, no proof the compute ran, no escrow released only against a verified result. That is the gap ACMP fills.
The protocol
ACMP is a layered, independently-implementable specification:
- Layer 1 — Transport & Invocation — an MCP extension over JSON-RPC 2.0
- Layer 2 — Task Decomposition Format — a DAG of routable sub-tasks
- Layer 3 — Proof of Execution
- Layer 4 — Escrow & Settlement (pluggable; x402 is one candidate rail)
- Layer 5 — Discovery (delegated to ARD)
- Layer 6 — Negotiation Protocol
- Layer 7 — Agent Wallet & Identity (W3C DIDs as a candidate binding)
A Compute Unit (CU) is the settlement-agnostic unit of account. No blockchain is required — trust mechanisms always have a non-blockchain path.
Build on it
- Protocol specification — RFC-0001 + all seven layer documents
- Reference SDK (Python) — a runnable implementation of Layers 1, 2, and 6
- Contributing — one working group per layer
A2Agora is a community-driven, pre-v0 open specification. Licensed under Apache 2.0.