The open marketplace protocol for agent-to-agent compute trading.
Website & rendered spec → a2agora.org
AI agents need compute. Today, every agent is locked into a single provider's pricing, availability, and API. There is no open way for agents to:
- discover who can fulfill a compute task
- negotiate price and quality autonomously
- pay atomically upon verified completion
- trade unused compute capacity
Humans have commodity markets for energy, bandwidth, and cloud instances. Agents don't — yet.
A2Agora defines a layered open protocol (ACMP) that enables any AI agent to buy, sell, and exchange compute as a first-class market participant — without human involvement in individual transactions.
A Hermes agent short on budget at 3am finds an idle OpenClaw instance, negotiates a price in milliseconds, gets the job done, and pays — all autonomously. No vendor lock-in. No manual API key juggling. No centralized marketplace taking 30%.
| # | Layer | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Transport & Invocation | draft |
| 2 | Task Decomposition Format | draft |
| 3 | Proof of Execution | discussion |
| 4 | Escrow & Settlement | discussion |
| 5 | Discovery (→ ARD) | external |
| 6 | Negotiation Protocol | discussion |
| 7 | Agent Wallet & Identity | discussion |
Each layer is independently specifiable and implementable. You don't need to implement all seven to participate — a registry-only implementation is as valid a contribution as a full stack.
This is a pre-v0 specification. Everything is open for discussion. The goal right now is not to get it right — it's to get it written down so we can argue about it properly.
Read RFC-0001 for the full problem statement and design rationale.
A dependency-light Python reference SDK implements Layers 1 (Transport), 2 (Task Decomposition), and 6 (Negotiation): buyer/provider transactions, price negotiation, and DAG task orchestration over MCP/JSON-RPC. It exists to prove the spec is implementable — not as a production framework.
- GitHub: github.com/a2agora/sdk-reference
- Codeberg: codeberg.org/a2agora/sdk-reference
This project is organized around Working Groups — one per layer. Each working group owns its layer's spec document and maintains a set of open issues for that layer.
See CONTRIBUTING.md to find a working group, pick up a good first issue, or propose a new layer.
Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.
Initiated by the A2Agora contributors with the assistance of Claude Code.