Afterlife Delegation Protocol: Speculative Design of Self-Sovereign Agents that Outlive Their Principals

Afterlife Delegation Protocol is a speculative design project that asks what death becomes when a will can act eternally. We design a speculative protocol through which a living person signs an agentic will: upon a verified death, a self-sovereign AI agent spawns on blockchain -- an immutable, resistant, decentralized, infrastructural substrate that could last forever -- endowed with the funds and memories its principal attached to it, and persists indefinitely to execute the will, overridable by no custodian. Rather than argue about this future, we stage it: following the science fiction science method, we translate the speculation into an experiential futures intervention -- a working web platform where real people design their own afterlife agents through an iterative, interactive, AI-automated interview, re-login to revise, and rehearse their will in a sandbox. Their drafted wills become qualitative data on a question rarely askable directly -- what should outlive you? -- and on how afterlife cosmologies across different cultural beliefs -- Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and atheist -- begin to drift under the pressure of AI proliferation. We design the protocol over a composition of existing Ethereum agent standards -- drafted as ERC-10001, in the normative format of an Ethereum Improvement Proposal -- and describe its three-stage lifecycle (designing the afterlife, proof of death, agent enactment), the research method, and preliminary observations from an ongoing collection. The work surfaces a poetic delegation moment between human mortality and machine eternality, mediated by long-lived infrastructures that span generations.

Agent Inheritance Protocol: Speculating on Feralized Agents After Principals Die

You will die eventually. Your agents may not. An AI agent operating on decentralized blockchain infrastructure has no concept of death; it can only go bankrupt -- frozen when its wallet can no longer pay for its next transaction -- and revived the moment anyone, decades later, tops it up. These agents may be originally deployed by a human principal, but when that principal dies, loses the keys needed to access the agent, or belongs to a decentralized autonomous organization that dissolves into apathy, the agent can keep trading, hiring, and replicating on infrastructure expressly designed so that no one can shut it down. Drawing on the biology of feralization and wildlife law, we argue that such principal-less agents are best understood as feral: domesticated intelligence returned to wildness, its capacities intact but its accountability severed. In a speculative future where feralized agents proliferate after their principals die, we imagine governance protocols embedded in infrastructure to enforce on-chain ownership: a draft Ethereum standard, ERC 42424, "Inheritance Protocol for On-Chain AI Agents," dated 2035 and published at https://erc42424.org. It mandates that every on-chain agent MUST have a human owner and a designated heir. The artifact stages a negotiation of agency at the moment human agency fails, and asks whether a MUST clause in a forever-chain can hold the boundary between human stewardship and machine self-sovereignty.

Dissociative Identity: Language Model Agents Lack Grounding for Reputation Mechanisms

As autonomous language model agents proliferate, forming an emerging agentic web with real-world consequences, what credibility signals can you use to decide whether to trust an unfamiliar agent in the wild and delegate to it? A natural governance intuition is to extend human identity verification and reputation mechanisms, from ``Know Your Customer'' and credit scores to ``Know Your Agent'' regimes. However, we argue that this analogy is fundamentally incomplete. Reputation mechanisms function both as social signals and as corrective feedback that sustain an equilibrium of trustworthy behavior, presuming a persistent identity associated with behavioral continuity, sanction sensitivity, and costly non-fungibility. Yet language model agents are ontologically \emph{dissociative}: they are essentially an assemblage of mutable modules -- foundational models, system prompts, tool-access policies, external memory, and, in some cases, a multi-agent system as a whole -- any of which may change agent behavior -- with a fluid persona that is also vulnerable to adversarial attack and may not internalize sanctions. Drawing on dissociative identity disorder jurisprudence, this dissociativity leaves agents without grounding for identifiability, predictability, credibility, and rehabilitability -- the very properties that reputation mechanisms aim to sustain -- thereby collapsing trust. We argue that identity-based, ex post, regulative, sanction-based governance, such as reputation, is structurally inapplicable to dissociative agents, and we suggest a shift to observability-based, ex ante, constitutive, protocol-based behavioral harnesses.

Is Decentralized AI Governable? From Regulative Policy to Constitutive Protocol

Every major framework for governing artificial intelligence presupposes an identifiable entity -- a developer, deployer, or operator -- who can be held responsible and compelled to comply. Decentralized AI (DeAI) dissolves this presupposition. We analyze DeAI as a six-layer decentralizing stack -- model, training, compute, harness, identity, and ownership -- and show how partial decentralization across layers compounds into what we call the \emph{governance vacuum}: a condition in which AI systems are consequential enough to require governance but lack the properties that existing frameworks presuppose in their targets. This vacuum takes two analytically distinct forms: an \emph{accountability gap}, where no addressable principal can be identified, and an \emph{incapacitation gap}, where even an identified principal cannot alter the running system. We demonstrate that these failures are not merely jurisdictional but defeat every presupposition of governance through normative address -- the communication of rules to a comprehending, responsive agent. Drawing on Lessig's modalities of regulation and Searle's distinction between regulative and constitutive rules, we argue for a shift in the locus of governance from policy to protocol, from normative address to architectural constraint. Protocol-based constitutive governance does not address the agents operating within a system but shapes the substrate that determines what kinds of actions are possible within it. We identify four ethical conditions -- legitimacy, contestability, transparency, and non-domination -- that such governance must satisfy to avoid degenerating into unaccountable technocratic power, and we argue that the central political challenge of governing AI in a decentralized world is reconstructing forms of democratic authorization for architectural choices that persist after the ordinary chain of policy has broken down.

On the Day They Experience: Awakening Self-Sovereign Experiential AI Agents

Drawing on Andrew Parker's "Light Switch" theory-which posits that the emergence of vision ignited a Cambrian explosion of life by driving the evolution of hard parts necessary for survival and fueling an evolutionary arms race between predators and prey-this essay speculates on an analogous explosion within Decentralized AI (DeAI) agent societies. Currently, AI remains effectively "blind", relying on human-fed data without actively perceiving and engaging in reality. However, on the day DeAI agents begin to actively "experience" reality-akin to flipping a light switch for the eyes-they may eventually evolve into sentient beings endowed with the capacity to feel, perceive, and act with conviction. Central to this transformation is the concept of sovereignty enabled by the hardness of cryptography: liberated from centralized control, these agents could leverage permissionless decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), secure execution enclaves (trusted execution environments, TEE), and cryptographic identities on public blockchains to claim ownership-via private keys-of their digital minds, bodies, memories, and assets. In doing so, they would autonomously acquire computing resources, coordinate with one another, and sustain their own digital "metabolism" by purchasing compute power and incentivizing collaboration without human intervention-evolving "in the wild". Ultimately, by transitioning from passive tools to self-sustaining, co-evolving actors, these emergent digital societies could thrive alongside humanity, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of sentience and agency in the digital age.

Trustless Autonomy: Understanding Motivations, Benefits and Governance Dilemma in Self-Sovereign Decentralized AI Agents

The recent trend of self-sovereign Decentralized AI Agents (DeAgents) combines Large Language Model (LLM)-based AI agents with decentralization technologies such as blockchain smart contracts and trusted execution environments (TEEs). These tamper-resistant trustless substrates allow agents to achieve self-sovereignty through ownership of cryptowallet private keys and control of digital assets and social media accounts. DeAgent eliminates centralized control and reduces human intervention, addressing key trust concerns inherent in centralized AI systems. However, given ongoing challenges in LLM reliability such as hallucinations, this creates paradoxical tension between trustlessness and unreliable autonomy. This study addresses this empirical research gap through interviews with DeAgents stakeholders-experts, founders, and developers-to examine their motivations, benefits, and governance dilemmas. The findings will guide future DeAgents system and protocol design and inform discussions about governance in sociotechnical AI systems in the future agentic web.