Identity, the canonical record of who or what a thing is, is the silent plumbing that enables today's digital discovery, aggregation, and payment systems. Because platforms keep this plumbing behind walls, we experience identity as part of a finished product: Amazon assigns identifiers (ASIN or FNSKU) to products, lists products in one place, and helps users discover and pay. Facebook is similar: A user's identity is the basis for their feed and for discovery across the app, including Facebook Marketplace listings, organic posts, and paid advertising.

This is all poised to change as AI agents advance. As more companies use agents — for customer service, logistics, payments, and other use cases — the less their platforms will look like single-surface apps. Instead they'll live across multiple canvases and platforms, accumulate deep context, and perform more tasks for users. But tying an agent's identity to only one marketplace makes it unusable everywhere else that matters: email threads, Slack channels, and within other products.

That's why agents need a single, portable "passport". Without one, there's no way to know how to pay the agent, verify its version, query its capabilities, know who the agent is working on behalf of, or trace its reputation across apps and platforms. An agent's identity needs to act as wallet, API registry, changelog, and social proof — so any interface (email, Slack, another agent) can resolve and speak to it the same way. Without the shared primitive of "identity", every integration needs to rebuild this plumbing from scratch, discovery remains ad-hoc, and users lose context each time they switch channels or platforms.

We have the opportunity to design agentic infrastructure from first principles. So how do we build a credibly neutral identity layer that is richer than a DNS record? Instead of reinventing monolithic platforms — where identity is combined with discovery, aggregation, and payment — agents should be able to accept payments, list capabilities, and exist in multiple ecosystems without fear of being locked in to any particular platform. This is where the intersection of crypto and AI is especially useful, because blockchain networks provide permissionless composability, which can allow builders to create more useful agents and better user experiences.

In general, vertically integrated solutions, like Facebook or Amazon, currently have better UX — part of the inherent complexity of building a great product is making sure the pieces make sense together, top down. But the price of that convenience is high, especially as the cost of building the software to aggregate, market, monetize, and distribute agents falls and the surface area for agentic apps expands. It'll take work to match the UX of vertically integrated providers, but a credibly neutral identity layer for agents would allow entrepreneurs to own their own passport — and encourage experimentation in distribution and design.