From Specification to Deployment: Empirical Evidence from a W3C VC + DID Trust Infrastructure for Autonomous Agents
For regulators and AI laboratories requiring a portable, cryptographically verifiable trust infrastructure for autonomous agents, this paper provides deployment-first evidence that such a system is implementable using W3C standards, though empirical validation at adversarial scale is pending.
The paper presents MolTrust, a production-deployed trust infrastructure for autonomous agents using W3C Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers, addressing the lack of a shared trust layer in high-volume agent transactions. It demonstrates kernel-level enforcement, cross-protocol interoperability, and Sybil resistance, with the system operational across eight credential verticals since March 2026.
Autonomous AI agents now transact at production scale -- 69,000 bots executing 165 million transactions across 50 million USDC in cumulative volume on a single marketplace -- without any shared trust layer between participants. Regulatory frameworks (Singapore IMDA, NIST CAISI, EU AI Act) and major AI laboratories (Anthropic, Google) have independently converged on the same structural requirement: an open, portable, cryptographically verifiable trust infrastructure for autonomous agents that no single vendor can deliver alone. This paper presents MolTrust, a production-deployed implementation of such an infrastructure built on W3C Verifiable Credentials 2.0 and Decentralized Identifiers v1.0, with on-chain anchoring on Base Layer 2. The system architecture is organized around four primitives (identity, authorization, behavioral record, portability), a five-party accountability chain, and the Agent Authorization Envelope (AAE) -- a machine-evaluable authorization structure enforced at three layers: cryptographic signatures, API-level credential lifecycle management, and kernel-level syscall monitoring via Falco eBPF integration. The paper documents three distinguishing capabilities: kernel-layer AAE enforcement below the agent process boundary; cross-protocol interoperability through five reproducible test vectors verified against independent implementations; and layered Sybil resistance combining dual-signature interaction proofs, cross-vertical endorsement diversity gating, and principal-DID-linked violation persistence. The reference implementation has been operational since March 2026 across eight credential verticals. Empirical validation at adversarial scale is pending. The contribution is deployment-first evidence that the trust infrastructure regulators and industry have converged on is implementable today using W3C-standardized primitives.