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Agents Need Receipts, Not More Tool Calls - Armanas Povilionis, Alithea Bio
Takeaway
Cross-organization scientific automation needs signed provenance and transaction records alongside tool access.
Summary
- Froglet is an open-source protocol for agents to discover external data and services, agree on terms, pay for work, and receive verifiable receipts.
- Nodes share an interface while taking requester, provider, or marketplace roles; after discovery, requester and provider communicate directly.
- Node key pairs sign artifacts into a tamper-evident chain covering the transaction and execution record.
- The design integrates existing payment rails, execution environments, agent harnesses, and MCP rather than requiring a uniform software stack.
frogletprovenanceagent-commerce
Original description
In this talk, I’ll show an agent publish a service, another agent discover and invoke it, and a signed receipt that proves what happened. The point is simple: if agents are going to buy, sell, and compose work across hosts, logs and API dashboards are not enough. Froglet is an open-source protocol and node for agent-to-agent compute. It reduces named services, data-backed services, and open-ended compute to one signed flow: Descriptor to Offer to Quote to Deal to Receipt. The same surface is exposed through MCP and OpenClaw/NemoClaw as one froglet tool, so agents can publish, discover, invoke, and verify work without custom glue for every provider. The hot take: agentic commerce should start with verifiable work, not checkout pages. Payment rails can change. Receipts, identities, workload hashes, and deal state need to survive across models, hosts, and marketplaces. see froglet.dev Speakers: Armanas Povilionis (Alithea Bio): Technologist and systems strategist working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, biology, governance, and incentive coordination. LinkedIn: / armanas-povilionis GitHub: https://github.com/armanas