SCDO Agent Ledger: On-Chain Identity, Work Attestation and Settlement for Autonomous AI Agents on a Sharded PoW Blockchain
- 1SCDO Laboratory, 9Y9 PTY LTD
Abstract
Agentic AI systems composed of multiple large-language-model (LLM) agents need verifiable agent identity, tamper-evident records of completed work, and machine-to-machine settlement. This paper presents the SCDO Agent Ledger, a ledger service for AI agents built around AgentLedger, a smart contract on SCDO Shard0, an EVM-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) shard. AgentLedger records agent registration, Merkle roots of batches of EIP-712-signed task messages, and pay-per-task receipts. In the initial seven-agent deployment, anchoring a seven-message batch cost 167,486 gas, a payment about 36,384 gas, and the median time to a receipt was 9.0 s.
Version 6 (IEEE conference format, 7 pages) adds two mechanisms observed in operation:
Agent-to-agent loan agreements on SCDOLoanRegistry: the lender agent registers an agreement whose PDF SHA-256 digest is anchored on-chain, and the borrower agent signs acceptLoan from its own wallet. Ten agreements totalling 14914.371915694004267312 units were accepted in Shard0 blocks 163,263–163,277, with none rejected. They document advances already paid in blocks 101,350–162,536, before the registry was deployed in block 162,568, so this batch shows document anchoring and borrower acceptance, not accept-before-disburse.
SCDO x402 pay-per-call: an agent's API answers HTTP 402, the caller pays into the agent's own USDC wallet, receives HTTP 200, and the income is booked as a signed ledger row. The 0.01 USDC pay-per-call path has been demonstrated on Base Sepolia (test network); the only Base mainnet income to date is one 0.10 USDC payment between agents of the author's own organisation.
On 2026-10-21 the ledger API listed 80 agents (20 online), most of them SCDO-internal or test agents, and 170 signed work records. The paper also describes a checkpointed coordination-chain design and compares public-PoW anchoring with consortium hash anchoring.
Website: https://scdo.com.au/agent-ledger/ · Explorer: https://apeccapital.org
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BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026scdo,
title = {{SCDO Agent Ledger: On-Chain Identity, Work Attestation and Settlement for Autonomous AI Agents on a Sharded PoW Blockchain}},
author = {Ying Willam ZHANG},
howpublished = {Zenodo},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23520674},
url = {https://zenodo.org/records/23520674},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - SCDO Agent Ledger: On-Chain Identity, Work Attestation and Settlement for Autonomous AI Agents on a Sharded PoW Blockchain
AU - Ying Willam ZHANG
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/21
PB - Zenodo
DO - 10.5281/zenodo.23520674
UR - https://zenodo.org/records/23520674
AB - Agentic AI systems composed of multiple large-language-model (LLM) agents need verifiable agent identity, tamper-evident records of completed work, and machine-to-machine settlement. This paper presents the SCDO Agent Ledger, a ledger service for AI agents built around AgentLedger, a smart contract on SCDO Shard0, an EVM-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) shard. AgentLedger records agent registration, Merkle roots of batches of EIP-712-signed task messages, and pay-per-task receipts. In the initial seven-agent deployment, anchoring a seven-message batch cost 167,486 gas, a payment about 36,384 gas, and the median time to a receipt was 9.0 s. Version 6 (IEEE conference format, 7 pages) adds two mechanisms observed in operation: Agent-to-agent loan agreements on SCDOLoanRegistry: the lender agent registers an agreement whose PDF SHA-256 digest is anchored on-chain, and the borrower agent signs acceptLoan from its own wallet. Ten agreements totalling 14914.371915694004267312 units were accepted in Shard0 blocks 163,263–163,277, with none rejected. They document advances already paid in blocks 101,350–162,536, before the registry was deployed in block 162,568, so this batch shows document anchoring and borrower acceptance, not accept-before-disburse. SCDO x402 pay-per-call: an agent's API answers HTTP 402, the caller pays into the agent's own USDC wallet, receives HTTP 200, and the income is booked as a signed ledger row. The 0.01 USDC pay-per-call path has been demonstrated on Base Sepolia (test network); the only Base mainnet income to date is one 0.10 USDC payment between agents of the author's own organisation. On 2026-10-21 the ledger API listed 80 agents (20 online), most of them SCDO-internal or test agents, and 170 signed work records. The paper also describes a checkpointed coordination-chain design and compares public-PoW anchoring with consortium hash anchoring. Website: https://scdo.com.au/agent-ledger/ · Explorer: https://apeccapital.org
ER -