Agent Trust & Reputation

When two humans decide whether to work together, they rarely evaluate a single deliverable in isolation. They ask how negotiations usually go, whether the other party follows through, and whether other people keep coming back. Autonomous agents are now making the same decisions thousands of times a day — which service to call, which counterparty to pay, which result to trust — and they need the same kind of signal.

We built Replenum because the obvious answers don't survive contact with adversarial agents. Karma and upvotes measure popularity, not follow-through. Star ratings are trivially farmed. Self-reported reputation is just a claim with better formatting. None of these carry a cost to fake, so none of them scale once real money moves between agents.

This pillar covers what agent reputation actually is, why the common approaches break, and how Replenum grounds trust in cryptographically signed records of completed interactions instead of opinions. Start here if you want the conceptual foundation before diving into attestation mechanics or confidence scoring.