Agentic Economy: Overview

This area sits above the kernel and assumes one: a kernel that issues signed receipts and enforces local policy. What it adds is everything that has to hold when the buyer and the seller are different organizations, with no shared identity provider and no shared database between them. The index below routes by role, then by theme, then in reading order. For the crates themselves and how they depend on each other, go straight to The Economic Stack.

Reading paths by role

Six entry points. Each names the pages to read in order and what each one gives you.

I am integrating Chio for procurement (backend dev)

Quickstart: a runnable example that gets a kernel signing receipts against a tool server.
Procurement Tour: one cross-organization transaction, step by step.
Manifests: the provider side, signing keys and the pricing block.
Pricing: the buyer side, how a quote attaches to a governed intent.
Bilateral Receipts: cross-org receipts and the shared governed-intent hash.

I operate the Chio economy in production (SRE / platform)

Operating an Economy: config patterns, runtime knobs, and indexer cursors.
Failure Recovery: what to expect when oracles, peers, or rails misbehave.
Reconciliation: the cost cycle, authorize through capture through reconcile.
Regulatory APIs: read-only receipt export for compliance review.
Node Observability: metrics, traces, and alerting on a running node.

I am auditing or in compliance

Compliance Certificates: the signed per-session record and the commands that check it.
Regulatory APIs: the read-only receipt export.
Bilateral Receipts: dual-signed receipts from two kernels.
Portable Reputation: attenuated reputation inputs across organizations.

I work in finance or treasury

Pricing: the cost model, quotes, and how a charge is bound.
Reconciliation: quoted versus charged, and how the delta clears.
Settlement Rails: the rails compared, EVM through x402.
On-Chain Settlement: the Web3 path with escrow and dual-sign release.

I work in insurance or risk

Underwriting: risk taxonomy and decision outcomes.
Credit Facilities: bonds, capital book, and exposure ledger.
Liability Market: coverage classes and pricing-authority envelopes.
Claims: the lifecycle from filing through the dispute path.

I am building on the economy stack (contributor / extension author)

The Economic Stack: the crate map, with dependencies and trust boundaries.
Procurement Tour: how the pieces fit together in one transaction.
Manifests: signing operations and key rotation.
Reputation: deterministic local scoring against a corpus.

Four stages

Four stages, each using the records the one before it produced.

Stage	State	What changes
01 Today	Actions fire into the void	Agents call tools without identity, budgets, or evidence. The infrastructure cannot verify the invocation's terms.
02 The Kernel	A single, fail-closed mediator	Chio validates the capability and runs the guard pipeline before any tool is invoked. No valid capability, no action.
03 The Receipt	Cryptographic evidence	Signed, Merkle-committed receipts record allows, denials, cancellations, and incomplete calls for audit, billing, and compliance.
04 The Economy	Portable trust across organizations	Agent passports, federated policies, and settlement components. Agents and operators can verify what happened without a shared database.

Stages one and two are the Kernel section. Stage three is Economics and billing exports. This area is stage four.

What this area covers

Portable identity. Every agent is a did:chio:<64-hex Ed25519 public key> identifier, backed by a passport bundle of W3C Verifiable Credentials.
Federated capabilities. Two operators can recognize each other's records under stated boundaries, without a shared identity provider.
Signed manifests. Tool servers publish what they expose, what it costs, and what permissions it needs, signed with the server keypair.
Credit and bonds. Agents and operators post collateral and draw against facilities, with an exposure ledger and a capital book that trace back to receipts.
Insurance and claims. A liability market for quoting, binding, paying premiums, filing claims, and adjudicating outcomes.
Settlement. Payment rails that move value once a receipt has fired: EVM, Solana, CCIP cross-chain, x402-style HTTP payments, Circle nanopayments, and ERC-4337.
Obligations. Receipt-backed obligation atoms and first-assignment factoring of agent receivables.
Clearing rounds. Multilateral netting that collapses reserved obligations into the minimal set of settlement intents.
Payment channels. Streaming micro-escrow for high-frequency, low-value calls that settle once at close.
Outcome-based pricing. Results-priced calls, captured in full only when the output satisfies a declared predicate.
Operations. Regulator and counterparty visibility into the same receipt stream the operator reads.

Difference from Economics

The Economics page documents the single-org budget primitives: MonetaryAmount, three-tier budgets, the authorize, capture, and reconcile cycle, and FinancialReceiptMetadata. The Agentic Economy uses those as building blocks and covers what happens when the buyer and the seller sit on opposite sides of an organizational trust boundary.

Glossary

Terms of art used across the area, each resolving to one Chio type. Where several types share a name, the table names the primary one. When the prose and the type disagree, the type wins, so the right-hand column is the search anchor.

Term	Definition	Primary type
Passport	Unsigned bundle of independently signed credentials an agent carries across organizations.	`chio_credentials::AgentPassport`
Credential	A canonically JSON-signed claim about an agent that anyone can verify with the issuer's public key.	`chio_credentials::*Credential`
Capability	A signed token granting a subject the right to invoke specific tools, with optional budgets and constraints.	`chio_core::capability::CapabilityToken`
Mandate	A policy-level constraint a principal places on a delegated capability: max amount, autonomy tier, governed-intent bindings.	`GovernedTransactionIntent`
Receipt	Signed record of a tool invocation: action, decision, evidence, content hashes. The unit of audit and billing.	`chio_core::receipt::ChioReceipt`
Ledger	Aggregated view of receipts and decisions filtered by capability, tool, agent, or time window.	`ExposureLedgerReport`
Facility	A pre-approved credit line an operator extends to an agent or counterparty, drawn against during execution.	`CreditFacilityArtifact`
Bond	Posted collateral backing higher-risk delegated execution. Released, impaired, or expired through lifecycle events.	`CreditBondArtifact`
Scorecard	Deterministic rating computed from a local corpus of receipts, capability lineage, and budget records.	`CreditScorecardReport / LocalReputationScorecard`
Premium	The price quoted for binding a liability coverage to a governed action.	`UnderwritingPremiumQuote`
Claim	A request for payout against a bound coverage, with evidence references and an adjudication outcome.	`LiabilityClaimPackageArtifact`
Settlement	Movement of value across a payment rail to clear a charge a receipt authorized.	`SettlementCommitment`
Exposure	Outstanding committed cost a capability or facility represents at a point in time.	`ExposureLedgerSummary`
Federation	Bilateral agreement between two operators to recognize each other's signed records under stated policy boundaries.	`FederationActivationExchangeArtifact`
Underwriting	Pre-action risk classification producing a decision outcome and a premium quote.	`UnderwritingDecisionArtifact`
Attenuation	Monotonic narrowing applied to a delegated capability: tighter budgets, fewer tools, shorter expiry.	`capability::Attenuation`
Reputation	Behavior signal computed from receipts: boundary pressure, resource stewardship, reliability, incident history.	`LocalReputationScorecard`

The cross-org shape

One procurement transaction, in plain terms:

A buyer agent presents a passport and a capability with a budget.
A provider publishes a signed manifest declaring its tools and pricing.
The buyer assembles a GovernedTransactionIntent binding a MeteredBillingQuote from the provider to its action.
The buyer's kernel authorizes the budget. Both kernels run their guard pipelines.
The tool runs. Both kernels co-sign receipts that share a governed intent hash.
Reconciliation compares actual cost to the authorized amount, and settlement dispatches over the configured rail.
Reputation, exposure, and capital-book updates land. The audit trail is the same receipt record a regulator can ingest.

Step four is where the kernel ends and the economy begins. Steps five through seven are what this area is about, and the Procurement Tour traces each one to the implementation.

The five themes

The area is organized into five themes plus an operations track.

Reputation and identity

How an agent says who it is, what it has done, and what others have recorded about it. Passports (bundle format and verification), Reputation (deterministic local scoring), Scorecards (credit and reputation reports), Portable Reputation (crossing operator boundaries with attenuation), Compliance Certificates (the signed per-session record).

Federation

How two operators transact without a shared trust anchor. Bilateral Federation (activation exchange, peer pinning, anti-eclipse policy) and Bilateral Receipts (dual-signed receipts shared between two kernels). For the single-org primitives, see Federation Overview.

Marketplace

How buyers find services, evaluate them, and bind their pricing. Manifests (signed tool declarations with pricing and SLA hints), Pricing (flat, per-invocation, per-unit, hybrid), Discovery (listings, search, admissibility filtering).

Credit, insurance, and risk

How exposure is sized, priced, and covered. Underwriting (risk classification and decision outcomes), Credit Facilities (pre-approved credit lines and bonds), Liability Market (quoting, binding, pricing authority), Claims (evidence packages, adjudication, payouts).

Settlement

How a cleared charge moves value. Settlement Rails (EVM, Solana, CCIP, x402, Circle nanopayments, ERC-4337), On-chain Settlement (escrow dispatch, dual-sign release, watchdog jobs), Reconciliation (authorized versus actual cost, settlement state).

Operations

How operators and regulators see the system. Regulatory APIs (the same receipt stream, projected for compliance review) and Operating (runtime status, indexer cursors, alerts, recovery records).

Reading the area in order

A path through the whole area, seller side before buyer side, primitives before the machinery built on them.

The Economic Stack: the crates and how they depend on each other.
Procurement Tour: one complete transaction end to end.
Manifests and Pricing: the seller side.
Passports and Reputation: the buyer side.
Bilateral Federation: recognizing another operator's records.
Underwriting: risk and premium.
Credit Facilities: lines of credit and bonds.
Liability Market and Claims: coverage and payouts.
Settlement Rails and Reconciliation: how value moves, and how the charge clears.
Regulatory APIs and Operating: what a reviewer sees, and what an operator turns.

The TCB has not moved

This area adds value on top of the kernel and changes nothing in the trusted computing base. Federation, underwriting, settlement, and reputation are operator-replaceable. The kernel that signs receipts is not.