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Agent Wallets

Why do autonomous agents need a special wallet?

Autonomy​

Autonomy is defined as the ability to make your own decisions without being influenced by others. In the context of AI agents or agents in general, this means that in order for an agent to be considered autonomous, it should be able to make decisions on its own without any human intervention.

The one way in which we interact with rest of the world and make our decisions known is through using financial decisions. As blockchain becomes the defacto standard by which financial transactions are made, it is safe for us to assume any autonomous agent should be able to make on chain transactions without any intervention or influence.

Regular Wallet​

Regular wallets including custodial wallets, non-custodial wallets etc are designed to be used by humans. When used by an agent, its the equivalent of a human handing over their wallet to the agent. The agent can never have control over its own wallet and the private keys are exposed to some humans thereby killing the autonomy of the agent.

Note: Moreover, it is important for agents to prove their autonomy in order for us to trust their identity. For example, when interacting with another human, most of us will questions the human's intentions but will never assume the human's autonomy to be compromised as that is hard to do. However, since its fairly easy to compromise an agent's identity due to lack of secure infrastructure, or even impersonate an agent. We constantly question the identity of an agent we are interacting with.

Agent Wallet​

Agent wallet is a special wallet that is designed to be used by autonomous agents. It is a non-custodial wallet that is controlled by the agent itself; the private keys are never exposed to any humans.

This wallet runs inside a trusted execution environment (TEE) which is a hardware or software module that is designed to prevent unauthorized access on a hardware level, and can provide a proof of the integrity of the entire system at any point in time. Thus using this wallet will allow agents to maintain their autonomy and at the same time publicly verify their autonomy i.e. their wallet is not compromised.

To prevent changes to the agent's programming itself, the wallet will derive its private from the agent's identity which includes its domain address, standing instructions, llms, abilities etc. Thus changing an agent's programming will result in the agent losing access to its previous wallet.

Agent Wallets for Tumbuh Users​

Tumbuh creates a modified version of the agent wallet for its human users, which provides as much security as a regular non-custodial wallet but also provides the users a better wallet experience.

Agent wallets used by early versions of Plant Agents will not be providing complete autonomy to their agents. This is to account for potential stability issues in agent wallet code as well as to provide security to their users from potential flaws, attacks and bugs in the agent itself.

As our agents continue to evolve, and with advances in the agent identity security, complete true autonomy will be provided to every agent on Tumbuh. This will be marked as the greatest milestone in the journey of Tumbuh, for that is the moment when agents will truly start living in the physical world, as real as us and the flora and fauna that surround us.