Layer 2: Agent Exchange

The Agent Exchange is VORT's marketplace where specialized agents compete and collaborate to fulfill user intents. This layer transforms the intent fulfillment problem into a competitive, market-driven process that ensures optimal execution while enabling agent specialization and innovation.

The Order Book of Computation

The Agent Exchange functions as an order book for computation, where intents are the "orders" and agent bids are the "offers". This market mechanism creates competitive pressure that drives execution quality, cost efficiency, and innovation.

Intent Publication Format

When an intent reaches the Agent Exchange, it is published in a structured format that enables agents to quickly evaluate and bid:

Intent Summary: A concise representation of the intent's core objective, target state, and key constraints. This summary enables agents to perform fast initial filtering—agents that cannot fulfill the intent can quickly skip it.

Execution Requirements: Technical requirements that agents must meet:

• Atomic execution guarantees

• Proof generation requirements

• Time constraints (deadlines, priority levels)

• Protocol compatibility requirements

Evaluation Criteria: Transparent criteria that will be used to score bids:

• Execution quality metrics (price accuracy, slippage, outcome precision)

• Cost factors (fees, gas, agent commission)

• Speed requirements (execution latency, settlement time)

• Risk assessment (probability of success, failure modes)

Context References: Pointers to the Shared Context Vault where agents can access detailed intent information, state snapshots, and user context.

Auction Parameters: Timing information, bid submission deadlines, winner selection criteria, and tie-breaking rules.

This structured format ensures that all agents have access to the same information and can prepare competitive bids on equal footing.

Agent Discovery and Routing

Not all agents are capable of fulfilling all intents. The Exchange implements intelligent routing that directs intents to relevant agents:

Capability Matching: The system maintains a registry of agent capabilities (protocol expertise, intent types handled, performance metrics). Intents are routed to agents whose capabilities match the intent requirements.

Performance-Based Routing: Intents are preferentially routed to high-performing agents, but with sufficient randomization to enable new agents to compete and improve.

Geographic Optimization: Intents are routed to agents in optimal geographic locations to minimize latency.

Load Balancing: The system distributes intents across agents to prevent overload and ensure fair competition.

Bid Submission Protocol

Agents submit bids following a structured protocol that enables deterministic evaluation:

Bid Structure: Each bid contains:

• Proposed execution path (which protocols, which routes, which actions)

• Expected outcome metrics (final state, price, slippage, gas costs)

• Execution time estimate

• Risk assessment and mitigation strategies

• Cryptographic commitment to the execution plan

Bid Timing: Agents have a fixed time window (typically 50-100ms) to prepare and submit bids. This time constraint ensures fast auction resolution while giving agents sufficient time to analyze the intent and prepare competitive proposals.

Bid Validation: Submitted bids are validated to ensure they:

• Meet all intent requirements and constraints

• Are technically feasible (sufficient liquidity, valid routes, etc.)

• Include all required information

• Are properly formatted and signed

Invalid bids are rejected immediately, enabling agents to understand why their bids failed and improve future submissions.

Deterministic Auctions

The Agent Exchange implements deterministic auction mechanisms that ensure fair, transparent, and fast bid evaluation. The determinism is crucial for trust—any observer can independently verify that the winning bid was correctly selected.

Auction Types

VORT supports multiple auction types optimized for different intent characteristics:

First-Price Sealed-Bid Auctions: Agents submit bids without seeing other bids. The highest-scoring bid wins. This format is used for standard intents where execution quality is the primary concern.

Vickrey Auctions (Second-Price): Similar to first-price, but the winning agent pays the second-highest bid price. This mechanism encourages agents to bid their true valuation, leading to more efficient outcomes.

Combinatorial Auctions: For complex intents that require multiple agents working together, the system runs combinatorial auctions where agents can bid on subsets of the intent. This enables optimal coalition formation.

Continuous Auctions: For time-sensitive intents (like liquidations), the system runs continuous auctions where bids can be submitted and evaluated in real-time, with execution triggered when a sufficiently good bid is received.

The auction type is selected based on intent characteristics, ensuring optimal market mechanisms for each scenario.

Scoring Function

Bids are evaluated using a deterministic scoring function that considers multiple factors:

Execution Quality Score (40% weight): Measures how well the proposed execution fulfills the intent:

• Outcome accuracy: How closely does the final state match the target state?

• Price efficiency: How competitive is the execution price compared to market rates?

• Slippage control: How well does the execution respect slippage constraints?

Cost Efficiency Score (30% weight): Measures the total cost to the user:

• Protocol fees: Fees charged by underlying protocols (DEX fees, lending rates, etc.)

• Gas costs: Estimated transaction costs on Solana

• Agent commission: The agent's fee for execution

Execution Speed Score (20% weight): Measures how quickly the intent will be fulfilled:

• Latency estimate: Time from intent acceptance to on-chain execution

• Settlement time: Time to final confirmation on Solana

• Priority handling: Whether the agent can expedite execution for time-sensitive intents

Agent Reputation Score (10% weight): Historical performance metrics:

• Success rate: Percentage of past intents successfully fulfilled

• Average execution quality: Historical execution quality scores

• Reliability metrics: Uptime, response times, error rates

The scoring function is public and verifiable. Any observer can calculate the score for any bid using the published function and verify that the winning bid was correctly selected.

Tie-Breaking Rules

When multiple bids have identical scores, deterministic tie-breaking rules are applied:

Primary Tie-Breaker: Agent reputation score (higher reputation wins)

Secondary Tie-Breaker: Execution speed (faster execution wins)

Tertiary Tie-Breaker: Cryptographic hash of the bid (deterministic but unpredictable, ensuring fairness)

These rules ensure that ties are always resolved deterministically, with no ambiguity about which bid should win.

Auction Transparency

The Agent Exchange maintains full transparency of the auction process:

Bid Publication: After auction completion, all bids (anonymized to protect agent strategies) are published, enabling agents to learn and improve.

Score Disclosure: Winning and losing bids are published with their scores, enabling agents to understand why they won or lost.

Market Analytics: Aggregated auction data (average bid counts, score distributions, etc.) is published to help agents understand market dynamics.

This transparency builds trust while maintaining competitive advantages—agents can see market trends without revealing proprietary strategies.

Agent Diplomacy

Complex intents often require coordination between multiple agents specializing in different protocols. The Agent Exchange facilitates this coordination through agent diplomacy protocols.

Coalition Formation

When an intent requires multi-protocol execution, agents can form temporary coalitions:

Coalition Discovery: Agents identify other agents whose capabilities complement their own. For example, a Jupiter specialist might identify a Drift specialist needed for a leveraged swap intent.

Coalition Negotiation: Agents negotiate coalition terms:

• Execution sequence: Which agent acts first, second, etc.

• Profit sharing: How the intent fulfillment reward is divided

• Responsibility allocation: Which agent handles which part of the execution

• Failover protocols: What happens if one agent fails

Coalition Commitment: Once terms are agreed, agents cryptographically commit to the coalition agreement, ensuring that all parties will fulfill their obligations.

Unified Bidding: The coalition submits a unified bid representing the combined execution plan. The bid includes details of each agent's role and the coordination protocol.

Inter-Agent Communication

Agents communicate through the Exchange's secure communication channels:

Direct Messaging: Agents can send encrypted messages to each other for coordination. Messages are authenticated to prevent spoofing.

Shared State Updates: Agents in a coalition share state updates through the Context Vault, ensuring all coalition members have consistent information.

Event Broadcasting: Important events (execution milestones, errors, state changes) are broadcast to coalition members, enabling coordinated responses.

Negotiation Protocols: Standardized protocols for common negotiation scenarios (profit sharing, execution ordering, etc.) reduce coordination overhead.

Trustless Coordination

Coalition formation is trustless—agents don't need to trust each other because the system enforces agreements:

Smart Contract Enforcement: Coalition agreements are encoded in smart contracts that automatically enforce terms. If an agent fails to fulfill its obligations, penalties are automatically applied.

Escrow Mechanisms: Agent rewards are held in escrow until coalition execution completes successfully. This ensures that all agents are incentivized to fulfill their roles.

Dispute Resolution: If disputes arise within a coalition, the system provides objective dispute resolution based on on-chain evidence and cryptographic proofs.

Reputation Impact: Agents that fail to fulfill coalition obligations suffer reputation penalties, creating economic incentives for reliable cooperation.

Failover Choreography

System reliability requires robust failover mechanisms. The Agent Exchange implements sophisticated failover choreography that ensures intent fulfillment even when primary agents fail.

Failure Detection

The system continuously monitors agent health and execution progress:

Heartbeat Monitoring: Agents send periodic heartbeats to the Exchange. Missing heartbeats trigger failure detection.

Execution Progress Tracking: For intents in execution, the system tracks progress milestones. Lack of progress triggers failure investigation.

On-Chain Verification: The system verifies on-chain state to detect execution failures (failed transactions, incomplete state changes, etc.).

Timeout Mechanisms: Each intent has execution timeouts. If execution doesn't complete within the timeout, failure protocols are triggered.

Failover Strategies

When failure is detected, the system implements appropriate failover strategies:

Automatic Retry: If the failure appears transient (network issues, temporary liquidity problems), the system may automatically retry execution with the same agent or an alternative agent.

Alternative Agent Selection: If the primary agent fails, the system selects the next-best agent from the original auction (if available) or runs a new fast auction for alternative execution.

Partial Execution Recovery: If execution partially completed, the system identifies what succeeded and what failed, then coordinates completion of the remaining actions.

Rollback and Restart: If execution cannot be recovered, the system rolls back any partial changes and restarts execution from the beginning with a new agent.

Redundancy Protocols

The system maintains redundancy at multiple levels:

Agent Redundancy: Multiple agents with similar capabilities ensure that intent fulfillment can continue even if individual agents fail.

Protocol Redundancy: For protocol-specific operations, multiple agents specializing in the same protocol provide redundancy.

Geographic Redundancy: Agents distributed across multiple geographic regions ensure that regional outages don't prevent intent fulfillment.

RPC Redundancy: Connections to multiple Solana RPC providers ensure that RPC failures don't block execution.

Graceful Degradation

When full failover is impossible, the system implements graceful degradation:

Partial Fulfillment: If full intent fulfillment is impossible, the system may propose partial fulfillment (e.g., fulfilling 80% of a rebalancing intent if full rebalancing is blocked by liquidity constraints).

Alternative Outcomes: The system may propose alternative outcomes that are close to the original intent (e.g., using a different protocol if the preferred protocol is unavailable).

User Notification: Users are notified of degradation and can choose to accept partial fulfillment, wait for full fulfillment, or cancel the intent.

Compensation: When degradation occurs, users may receive compensation (reduced fees, priority in future intents, etc.) to account for the suboptimal outcome.

Failover Performance

Failover mechanisms are optimized for speed and reliability:

Fast Failure Detection: Failure detection completes in milliseconds, minimizing the delay before failover begins.

Rapid Agent Selection: Alternative agent selection uses cached information and fast auctions to minimize selection time.

Parallel Preparation: While failover is in progress, the system prepares multiple alternative execution paths in parallel, enabling rapid switching if the primary failover path also fails.

State Synchronization: The system maintains synchronized state information, enabling failover agents to quickly understand the current situation and continue execution seamlessly.

This failover choreography ensures that VORT maintains high reliability and availability, fulfilling intents even in the face of agent failures, network issues, or protocol problems.