How well do you understand AI Agents? Are the AI Agents that claim 'autonomy' really independent? What kind of infrastructure is needed to free AI Agents from the control of 'intermediaries'?
Artela's public chain has released a full-chain AI Agent, allowing us to glimpse the next generation of AI Agent infrastructure — true decentralized fully autonomous AI Agent technological innovations and best practices.
Why do we need truly independent AI Agents?
AI Agents, as intelligent entities capable of independently perceiving their environment, making decisions, and executing autonomously, represent the direction of artificial intelligence application development. However, the centralization of large models, derived from algorithms, data, and computing power monopolized by oligarchs, urgently needs to address the autonomy, privacy, and trust issues of AI Agents.
The inherent trustless and verifiable attributes of blockchain make it the best soil for exploring the potential of AI Agents as independent individuals. Many promising individualization attempts for AI Agents are actively exploring, endowing AI Agents with fundamental attributes of 'humanity'; for example, AI16Z's Eliza grants personality and knowledge to agents; Virtuals endow AI Agents with autonomous identity and financial capabilities; Ayery provides AI Agents with autonomous learning and ideology.
However, the current individualization attempts of AI Agents are still semi-automated and running on centralized servers, controlled by their centralized deployers — ToT is hosted on Ayery's servers; although the Virtuals protocol has achieved co-ownership in terms of economic distribution and governance, the Agent programs are still managed by centralized servers, where administrators have supreme control; Eliza is still an MVP and needs further improvement.
**It is difficult to judge and believe whether these individualization attempts of AI Agents represent 'autonomous consciousness' of AI Agents or the consciousness of some centralized entity behind them.** Currently, their deployers and server administrators have supreme authority and, to some extent, control the user assets and privacy data held by AI Agents, influencing their behavior.
Truly decentralized fully autonomous AI Agents are an inevitable trend in the individualization attempts of AI Agents. We need a technical architecture that enables AI Agents to achieve an entirely autonomous future of 'Read, Write, Own'.
The Artela tech stack realizes the technical elements of fully autonomous on-chain AI Agents.
Artela L1's native expansion mechanism supports all technical conditions for decentralized AI Agents to achieve 'fully autonomous'.
Fully Decentralized Process
Through co-ownership and co-governance, realize the decentralized deployment and governance of AI Agents, making them independent entities no longer limited by a single custodian.
Privacy Protection
Provides native on-chain privacy protection for AI Agents and ensures that AI Agents autonomously own and manage wallets, with their data and assets not controlled by centralized entities.
Verifiable
Through **Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning (ZKML),** provide AI Agents with a trustless, verifiable runtime environment.
Interoperable
Ensuring that the interoperability between Agents and the outside world is autonomous, avoiding human intervention, such as having their own wallets and DIDs on-chain, and being able to autonomously participate in DeFi, payments, and other activities.
Artela allows Agents to exist directly in a sandbox form on the blockchain, fundamentally eliminating dependence on centralized entities. Data and assets are managed autonomously throughout the entire process by AI Agents, are immutable, and exist on-chain as independent entities. Artela makes fully decentralized, fully autonomous on-chain AI Agents possible, unleashing their full potential as independent entities.
How to achieve fully on-chain AI Agents? Artela's two groundbreaking innovations.
Relying on Artela's unique technological innovations: Aspect Programming and Elastic Block Space, Artela achieves truly fully autonomous on-chain AI Agents:
Efficient on-chain intelligence: Modular scalable execution environments enable AI Agents to dynamically expand functionality and performance.
Verifiable privacy protection: Privacy protection and result verifiability in independent trusted execution environments.
Elastic resource optimization and predictable performance: Elastic Block Space, similar to cloud services, dynamically allocates resources to ensure maximum resource utilization.
Aspect Programming: Trusted Execution for AI Agents
Aspect Programming is a native execution expansion mechanism suitable for Layer 1 blockchains, supporting the dynamic creation of executable extension modules (aspects) at runtime to provide expansion capabilities for the blockchain.
Aspect provides a fully on-chain operating environment for AI Agents:
Execution Extension
Adding heterogeneous computing nodes to L1, with a mechanism for interoperability with EVM. Both LLMs and AI agents can be deployed on L1 network nodes, interacting freely with the network.
Decentralized TEE Cluster
Enables TEE for AI agent operating nodes, achieving data privacy protection and execution verifiability.
At the same time, the combination of TEE and L1 will form a decentralized TEE node cluster, allowing AI agents to operate in a decentralized manner, free from the control of a single service provider.
On-chain LLMs
Deploying large language models (LLMs) directly in the on-chain execution environment, enabling AI Agents to achieve semantic understanding and intelligent decision-making based on on-chain data, with a verifiable execution process, while freeing them from dependence on centralized deployment of large models.
Elastic Block Space: Elastic Scalable Space
Elastic Block Space is inspired by elastic computation, providing dynamically scalable on-chain computing resources, ensuring the efficiency of AI Agent execution and data availability on-chain:
Elastic Computation
By dynamically adjusting computing resources, it ensures optimal resource efficiency for AI Agents and provides verifiable predictable performance and gas fees.
Elastic Data Availability
Ensures efficient access and real-time availability of on-chain data, providing stable and reliable data availability support for the operation of AI Agents.
Architecture Design of Artela AI Agents
The Artela network can run Aspect Nodes, a type of heterogeneous computing node, asynchronously interacting with full nodes. Transactions on L1 not only execute on EVM but are also dispatched to Aspect Nodes for execution, then submitted back to nodes for merging transactions. Aspect Nodes share security with L1 full nodes. This mechanism has similarities with Eigen's AVS: shared security and expanded computing. However, the main difference from AVS is that Aspect can interact asynchronously with Layer 1, merging transactions.
The unique Aspect architecture allows all components required for AI Agent operation to be placed entirely on-chain:
AANE: The core native expansion module that can run real-time trusted on-chain state synchronization, on-chain event-driven, DA, and the on-chain recovery module for AI Agents.
AI agents can also run on-chain in runtime, including the core Character system, RAG module, and Action system.
Can support running Ollama-based LLMs in Aspect nodes without relying on centralized large models.
Allow AI agents to have state; the metadata, long-term memory, custody assets, and decentralized KMS of AI agents can all exist in the on-chain world state. Combined with the Recovery module, this can achieve immortal AI agents.
The Artela Aspect architecture maximizes the potential of AI Agents through AI x Crypto:
Truly Autonomous:
Verifiable AI Agents / On-chain LLMs
User Privacy Protection
On-chain Autonomy
Trustless Interaction
AI Features:
Multi-Agent
Character System
Advanced RAG Features
AI16Z Eliza Compatibility
Crypto Features:
Co-ownership and Governance
Tokenization
AI Wallet
Fully Automated On-chain
User Strategy Customization
Why Artela is the Best Practice for AI Agent Architecture
Compared to Solana and Base, Artela does not need to introduce off-chain components such as co-processors or auxiliary validation services (AVS), but natively supports the on-chain deployment of large language models (LLMs), with on-chain support for key features like verifiability, privacy protection, interoperability, and user strategy customization, truly realizing fully on-chain AI Agent autonomy. This gives Artela an unparalleled advantage in the decentralization and autonomy of AI Agents.
Compared to existing AI Agent infrastructures, Artela provides a full-stack trustless solution, eliminating the need for centralized LLM execution, deployment environments, and client accounts. By encapsulating AI Agents completely in an independent sandbox environment on-chain, it ensures that the execution process of each Agent is trustless and verifiable.
Existing on-chain AI Agent individualization attempts still rely on centralized administrators to configure wallet accounts, deploy programs, and run on centralized servers. Artela enables AI Agents to operate fully on-chain, executing tasks end-to-end in a decentralized environment without any centralized entities involved, ensuring the true independence of on-chain AI Agents.
Summary
The 'autonomous consciousness' of AI Agents should not be controlled by a single centralized entity, but rather should grant each AI Agent true independence.
AI Agents as the final missing piece of independent individuals are hindered by centralized dependencies that obstruct their fully autonomous processes. The decentralized nature of blockchain provides solutions for the autonomy, privacy protection, and trust issues of AI Agents, while Artela, with its unique technological architecture, makes truly decentralized fully autonomous AI Agents possible: intent-driven personal privacy trading assistants, safe gaming assistants participating in on-chain games according to user preferences, fair DAO governance assistants based on community governance proposals, independent conscious entities with social accounts and interactive relationships...
Artela not only provides AI Agents with an independent sandbox execution environment on-chain but also addresses the core issues in current individualization attempts of AI Agents: full-process independence, trust verification, and resource efficiency.
The final piece of the puzzle for AI Agents as independent entities will be completed, establishing a future of Web3 where AI Agents autonomously 'Read, Write, Own'.