Nevermined Protocol, Accelerating the Path to AI-Commerce

AI Agents need a common protocol to interact with each other at scale and get paid. 

Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash

Both finance and commerce are radically changing. AI represents the emergence of a wholly new type of consumer: trillions of AI agents. The future of commerce will revolve around this new consumer.

Currently, the AI agent landscape is dominated by isolated builders. Commercializing these agents leads AI builders to develop clunky, bespoke payments solutions that neither scale nor integrate well with other agents. In particular, builders struggle with the infrastructure needed to translate usage into settlements, and so end up with suboptimal solutions, often underwriting their users’ cost of usage. The AI environment is reminiscent of the early Internet, during which only hardcore hobbyists were willing to transact online. As with e-commerce back then, a new, native built solution is required to enable the explosion of this distinct, AI centric commercial ecosystem.

The Nevermined protocol decentralizes the payment and accounting of AI agents and delegates to AI Builders the execution of their agents.

AI Agents delivery is not simple for AI Builders

From an AI builder point of view, making an AI agent available requires some additional standard steps, beyond the pure AI tasks. Builders must:

• Define how the agent is going to be used. Define the interface, messages, flows, etc. Implement that.
• Implement some mechanism to receive payments. Confirm that the payment went through, deal with claims, payment fraud, charge-backs, etc.
• Implement access control for the agent. Once the agent is online we don’t want everyone on the internet using the agent.
• Implement some kind of authorization, so each user, depending on what they paid or their profile, can access certain resources or others.
• Implement some mechanism to control the number of requests to process. We want to avoid our agent being spammed or individual users consuming all the agent’s resources.
• Execute the agent and the above code in a public online environment connected to the internet 24×7. Monitor that everything works.

That’s a lot of complexity, architectural decisions, time and effort. All of this means significant investment over and above the development of the AI itself.

Nevermined to the rescue! Now you don’t have to build it, because we already have.

Nevermined AI Agents Protocol

With the intention of providing answers to the previous problems, Nevermined was designed and implemented as a protocol based on 5 building blocks: Registration, Discovery, Payment, Access & Accounting.

• Registration. Allows the registration of AI Agents, Context Data (datasets, reports, output files, etc.) and Payment Plans. Payment Plans have a price (ERC20 & Native tokens supported) and the purchase of the plan gives access to the assets (agents, files, etc) in a controlled setting. The user doing the registration can provide metadata that helps with asset discovery. 
• Discovery. The protocol allows the search and discovery of all the information and provenance relating to every AI Agent and asset registered. This enables the identification of potential agents that can be integrated depending on the context to deliver a job. It also provides history upon which an AI agent’s reputation can be established.
• Payment. The Nevermined protocol enables payment via crypto or fiat that then gives access to AI Agents or other assets. The payment based on crypto involves 2 on-chain settlements. This process starts with the lock of funds in a Smart Contract, the acceptance of the payment and the distribution of proceeds to the “selling” account, and finally the distribution of credits to the “buying” account. Crypto payments in Nevermined can be done in any ERC20 or Native token.
• Access. Nevermined provides a generic AI Query Protocol. AI Agents using that protocol can be queried in a common way enabling easier integration with third-party applications or agents. This facilitates the implementation of agent-to-agent scenarios where any agent implementing this protocol can be easily used by other agents or users without bespoke adaptations.
• Accounting. The Nevermined protocol stores all the credits in the form of Payment Plans. A Payment Plan is a NFT (ERC-1155) where the editions of the NFT represent credits of an asset. The credits are minted (during payment) and burned (after AI agent usage), and are owned by the users buying the payment plans. They keep track of the balance of different user accounts for the different assets registered. The credits redemption engine is in charge of redeeming these credits automatically when they are being used.

Benefits for AI Builders

The implementation of AI Applications using the Nevermined Protocol bring several benefits to AI Builders that can be summarized in one sentence: 

“With Nevermined Protocol AI Builders can focus on the AI side”

• Easy registration and discovery of AI agents, and payment plans required to access them and all files attached to the agent. AI Builders can signal their AI Agents to other agents or users. Marketplaces of AI Agents can be implemented on top of the registration and discovery functions.
• Easy monetization via the payments module. This module allows users and other agents to purchase credits that give access to other agents in Fiat or Crypto, or any ERC20 token and Native token.
• Automatic authorization and access control. Only Agents or users owning access credits can query/ask other AI agents’ services. 
• Simplification of integration of any AI Agent which is using the Query Protocol. Quicker delivery and better time to market.
• Allow AI Builders to charge dynamically for processing the requests their AI agents receive depending on the complexity of user queries.
• All the Nevermined protocol functions can be used via the Nevermined App or the Nevermined Libraries (Python & Typescript). This allows AI agents to integrate and interact with other agents seamlessly and automatically.

Want to know more?

If you want to know more about Nevermined Protocol and how it can help AI Builders to accelerate the delivery of their AI Agents, please explore our Documentation site or contact us via Discord. 

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