Decentralized Agent Network

also known as ANP, Open-Network Agent Discovery, DID-Based Agent Identity, 去中心化智能体网络

Agents publish signed DID+JSON-LD identity records so any peer can discover and verify them without a central registry — the agent equivalent of the open web.

Context

Agent interop protocols so far assume known endpoints. MCP exposes tools to a client that already knows where the MCP server is. A2A connects peer agents whose endpoints have been pre-shared. Both presume some bootstrapping mechanism — a directory, a marketplace, an enterprise registry — that everyone trusts. As agent populations grow across organisational boundaries and across the public internet, no single registry is going to scale or be trusted by all parties.

Problem

Centralised agent registries do not scale across the public internet: every party must trust the registry operator, every cross-org integration requires an admin to onboard, and the registry becomes a single point of policy and failure. There is no protocol for an agent in organisation A to discover and cryptographically verify an agent in organisation B without a pre-arranged channel. Capability advertisement, identity verification, and authorisation all collapse onto the registry operator, who becomes a gatekeeper at internet scale.

Forces

Open-network discovery requires identity that does not depend on a central operator.
Cryptographic verification must work across organisational boundaries with no shared CA.
Capability graphs need a schema everyone can parse without an out-of-band agreement.
Decentralized stacks add operational complexity over a simple HTTP registry.

Example

A research assistant agent operated by organisation A wants to delegate a domain-specific subtask to an analytical agent operated by organisation B. There is no shared marketplace or directory. Under ANP, organisation B's agent has published its DID and a JSON-LD capability graph advertising the analytical service and its A2A endpoint. Organisation A's agent resolves the DID, fetches the capability graph, verifies the signature against B's published keys, and delegates the task over A2A. The first interaction required no admin onboarding on either side.

Diagram

Solution

Therefore:

Assign every agent a W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) resolvable via a DID method (DID:web, DID:key, DID:ion, etc.). Publish the agent's capability graph as JSON-LD signed by the DID's key, hosted at a location the DID document points to. A peer wanting to discover or verify the agent resolves the DID, fetches the JSON-LD capability graph, verifies the signature against the DID's published keys, and proceeds with whatever interop protocol the capabilities advertise (MCP, A2A, or domain-specific). No central registry sits in the path; trust derives from the cryptographic chain rooted in the DID method.

What this pattern forbids. Agent identity may only be asserted via the published DID; capability claims may only be trusted after JSON-LD signature verification against the DID's keys, so no in-band claim from an unverified agent is honoured.

The smaller patterns that complete this one —

generalisesDecentralized Swarm Handoff★— Agents in a swarm decide handoffs to peers based on a shared protocol with no central coordinator; specifically about agent-initiated handoff protocols, not topology.

And the patterns that stand alongside it, or against it —

complementsModel Context Protocol★★— Standardise how agents discover and call tools so that a tool written once is usable by any conformant agent.
alternative-toInter-Agent Communication★— Define a protocol for agents to exchange tasks, capabilities, and results across process or vendor boundaries.
alternative-toCross-Domain Enterprise Agent Network★— Decompose enterprise agency into domain-specialised agents (finance, supply chain, HR, service), each grounded in its own system of record, and route artefacts between them through a standardised inter-agent protocol.
complementsTool Discovery★— Let the agent discover available tools at runtime rather than hardcoding the tool list at agent build time.
alternative-toCellular-Automata Agents·— A swarm where each agent applies simple local rules to its immediate neighborhood; macro behavior emerges without a central orchestrator and without global information access.