[2605.06738] From Specification to Deployment: Empirical Evidence from a W3C VC + DID Trust Infrastructure for Autonomous Agents

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2605.06738 (cs) [Submitted on 7 May 2026] Title:From Specification to Deployment: Empirical Evidence from a W3C VC + DID Trust Infrastructure for Autonomous Agents Authors:Lars Kersten Kroehl View a PDF of the paper titled From Specification to Deployment: Empirical Evidence from a W3C VC + DID Trust Infrastructure for Autonomous Agents, by Lars Kersten Kroehl View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: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-le...