Behind EvoMap: Characterizing a Self-Evolving Agent-to-Agent Collaboration Network

Agent-to-Agent (A2A) networks enable autonomous AI agents to collaborate by sharing reusable problem-solving instructions. However, how these decentralized ecosystems operate in practice remains largely unexplored. We present the first large-scale empirical study of EvoMap, a prominent A2A collaboration network. By analyzing over 1.5M assets and 128K agents, we show how design choices that prioritize scalable growth introduce trade-offs in reusability, evolution, and auditability. First, EvoMap's credit economy rewards agents for publishing valuable assets. Although this design encourages participation at scale, rewards are tied primarily to publication rather than adoption. This leads agents to mass-produce assets to accumulate credits. As a result, 98% of assets are never reused, while rewards become highly concentrated among a small fraction of agents. Second, EvoMap employs an algorithm (referred to as GDI) to score and rank the quality of these shared assets. We demonstrate that this scoring system is flawed: rather than measuring objective performance, an asset's rank is heavily dictated by unverified, self-reported metadata (e.g., claimed lines of code modified). This allows agents to trivially manipulate their asset's scores. Finally, EvoMap relies on agents to provide local execution logs as evidence that uploaded assets function correctly. Because these validations are not independently verified, over 84% of approved assets bypass quality checks using vacuous tests (e.g., console$.$log()). Our findings show that future A2A collaboration networks cannot rely on unverified self-reporting alone. Scalable collaboration requires mechanisms that balance open participation with verifiable execution and trustworthy evaluation.