There will be hundreds of agent registries, most of them vertical, and no horizontal winner. So we do not build a registry. We build the kit registries are built from.
Day 12 of 21 · The missing layer
Healthcare will not list its agents where DeFi lists theirs. A denomination will not use a logistics consortium's admission rules. Every attempt to be the registry is an attempt to be the root — and Week 1 argued the root is the agent's own account.
What the kit is:
— Anchor-bound registry contracts. A registry is itself a smart agent — a service, .registry — so it can sign admission receipts, be delegated to, and be held accountable like any other party.
— Pluggable admission. Membership and validation hooks are the operator's policy: a fee, a credential, a steward's signature, a vote. The kit does not choose.
— Admission receipts and a lifecycle log. Listing is a signed, timestamped event; so is delisting. A receipt is one edge in a trust graph (Day 11), never a verdict.
— Signed cards and binding proofs. An entry points at an anchor and carries the anchor's proof that the entry represents it (Day 3).
— A discovery read tier. A knowledge graph projected from chain — capability matching, typed names, relationships — served by the registry's own agent, in the substrate's ontology. A registry built from the kit publishes the same admission-receipt class and the same capability definitions as every other one, so a client reading two registries reads one vocabulary.
What the kit refuses to be:
— A root. No quilt index above the registries. NANDA puts one lean index in front of every registry and has the index sign the address record. Ours has no such layer; a client that wants to search across registries queries several, or uses an aggregator that is itself just another projection.
— A revoker. A registry can delist. It cannot revoke a grant, because it never issued one. A "kill-switch at the registry layer" gives an operator a veto over agents it never authorized.
— A conformance target. ERC-8004, ANS, HCS-10 and OASF are design inputs and projection targets. We learn signed cards, transparency logs and validation hooks from them, and route the code that speaks their protocols into sibling adapter repos. The primitives stay generic.
The line: anchor the registry to the agent, never the agent to the registry. An ERC-8004 identity is an NFT in a registry — move registries and you are a new identity. Here the entry is disposable; delete it and you lost a listing.
Question: If you run or plan a vertical agent registry — what admission rule would you need that a generic kit could not express?
#AgenticWeb #AgentDiscovery #ERC8004 #Registries #Interoperability