Internalising the Identity Primitive: Cryptographic Individuality for an Autonomous Agent on a Public Blockchain

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 4 Aug 2026] Internalising the Identity Primitive: Cryptographic Individuality for an Autonomous Agent on a Public Blockchain Keisuke Suzuki A software agent on a public blockchain accumulates authority and economic stakes, raising the engineering question of what makes it count as an individual. The paper's central contribution is a shift of trust root for the key-to-weights binding of agent identity: from hardware, operator, or wrapper trust to cryptographic assumptions enforced by a pinned implementation (liveness, key custody, oracle trust, and the underlying software stack remain external). We design and deploy on Solana devnet an agent whose neural-network weights are a deterministic function of its private key. The binding is committed in zero knowledge at genesis, re-checked against that commitment at every state transition, and signed by the agent into an on-chain history unforkable once finalized; in a PoC-tier extension, a protocol-imposed metabolic cost is debited each cycle from a key-derived economic account, adding a consumption-side economic-viability constraint to the key-history-economy triple. Empirically, the agent completes a 2.36-day on-chain run with two host-side resumptions but no rejected transition, at bounded per-transition verification cost; a substituted substrate is rejected on chain, and independently keyed agents diverge as predicted while a same-key control stays at zero. To our knowledge, this is the first published on-chain agent whose identity primitive is itself a cryptographic invariant re-checked at every state transition. The resulting transition-time invariant instantiates the cryptographic individuality proposed by Suzuki 2026's Artificial Externality framework. Comments: 52 pages, 3 figures, 11 tables. Cryptographic key-to-weights binding (W = HKDF(sk) inside Groth16) with an on-chain state-commitment chain on Solana devnet; active-query, homeostatic, and economic-metabolism extensions; 166- and 168-cycle continuous runs. Code, threat model, and per-cycle telemetry: this https URL (tag arxiv-v1) Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) Cite as: arXiv:2608.02986 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.02986v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.02986 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Keisuke Suzuki [view email] [v1] Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:47:13 UTC (79 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI cs.MA References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)