Delete your agent's registry entry, its ENS name and its DID document. Did it lose a single permission? If yes, those were never projections. They were the identity, and you had it in three places.
Day 3 of 21 · The missing layer
Yesterday: the agent is an account — the anchor. Today: everything else is a projection of it — a deterministic, pure rendering of selected canonical facts for one external target, carrying a proof the anchor signed.
One agent, many projections:
— A2A Agent Card — how to interact: capabilities, endpoints; JWS-signed, bound to the account by an EIP-712 proof. — Typed name (alice.me, outreach.team, outreach.treasury) — a forced-unique human name → anchor. The suffix names the agent type — a class in our ontology — and is checked against the on-chain type record. — DNS host <label>-<type>.<zone> — the same name for legacy resolvers; reversible. — Registry entry (our kit, ERC-8004, ANS, HCS) — a listing plus an admission receipt. — ARD / ACP records — aggregate registry-hosted views. — `did:web` — where the anchor is served today. A protocol projection, never the identity. — ENS — a name in another namespace → anchor.
Three properties follow.
One writer. The card's skills[], the registry's capabilities[] and the on-chain capability ids are all projected from one profile.capabilities[] by one projector — and each capability id names a definition in the ontology, so the same id means the same thing on every surface. The card never carries a fact the profile does not. NANDA's papers call AgentFacts "a superset of the Agent Card"; we run the arrow the other way — the card is a loss-reported projection of the profile.
Every projection is disposable. Remove the ERC-8004 entry, the ENS name, the did:web document — the agent still signs, delegates and revokes, and every grant it issued is still valid. You lost a listing, not an identity.
Separated roles. In our Home control plane a card is edited by one role, approved by another, signed by the anchor's custodian and published by a fourth. A projection is a release, not a form.
The line: the thing that lists you should never be the root of trust for who you are. ERC-8004 anchors reputation and validation at the NFT — at a projection. NANDA's index signs the AgentAddr — the registry authenticates the agent's own address record. We think the agent signs that record, and a registry's signature binds only the fact that it lists you.
Honest limit: the A2A card, typed name, DNS and registry-kit projections are live. The did:web, ENS and ERC-8004 projectors belong in a sibling integration repo and are not all shipped.
Question: Which of your agent's external records could you delete today without the agent losing a permission?
#AgenticWeb #A2A #AgentIdentity #Interoperability #ERC8004
Previously: Day 2 — Identity that signs. Next: Day 4 — Credentials rotate; identity doesn't.