The Internet's Notary Public: Why Verifiability Matters

As agents become part of our everyday life, it is critical to verify their actions.

At Axal, we’re building a network of verifiable agents to execute tasks on the internet.

It feels kinda obvious why you’d want agents to do things for you – save time so you could ape in more in moodeng or, idk, find love and raise a family, really your choice – but why is verifiability so important?

Like right now, much of the internet isn’t verified → we have a “trust me bro” system that underpins a TON of what we do online. 

There’s some obvious problems here. If you think about it, it is a little weird that we’re just trusting organizations to fulfill our tasks, and not getting guarantees on them.  

Well, it is important. Trust me. We at Axal are cheap AF – our head of growth (who is co-authoring this article in third person right now) actually had a cheap food instagram account titled @ ballingbroke (not so subtle plug). 

Verifiability is necessary for the internet to enter its next iteration. It allows for us to outsource complex actions to third parties, knowing with confidence that the action will be satisfactorily completed. 

As we enter what McKinsey writes as the era of agents, more and more of our actions are going to be outsourced to third party autonomous solvers that take user intents and go out to execute them. 

ALL OF THESE tasks NEED verification. 

Why verification matters

Blockchains verify transactions with what’s called a consensus mechanism. You’ve probably heard of “Proof of Stake” or “Proof of Work.” 

Without decentralized verification, there is no DeFi, DeSci, DePin, DeAnything. 

Agents will run on these rails because the primitives for agent to agent interactions don’t exist. Banks, credit cards, real estate, you name it, were built with person to person transactions in mind.

So we’re at a weird point in the crypto ecosystem with fully centralized agents running on decentralized, trustless rails. 

If we’re going to outsource more and more of our day to day lives to agents, we need to know that they’re actually doing what we tell them to.

You have to trust your trading agent (or the company that built it) with access to your wallet to trade on your behalf. You have to trust your personal assistant agent with access to your calendar to book an itinerary with what you want to do. Axal’s solution is simple:

DON’T TRUST, VERIFY.

How verification comes about 

In the Axal system, verification comes about through the Intent Verification Coordinator, or IVC. 

Let’s say your Autopilot is conducting a quarterly rebalancing, and you need to decrease SOL exposure and increase ETH exposure. The intent is to SWAP x SOL for y ETH.

An auction occurs for agents to fill that request for a fee. Once filled, the solution is passed onto the IVC and checked against the initial request.

Verification can happen at the contract level → confirming an on-chain action by looking at the contract call; or by consensus → a group of incentivized actors agreeing that the outcome is correct. 

Axal is exploring various solutions for different task types, including optimistic verification through UMA (the same set up securing Polymarket and Across), ZK coprocessors, and zkTLS.

Here’s the key: if not satisfied, the intent is re-posted and the agent is slashed (and potentially blacklisted).

That’s why Axal is like a notary public. It’s a stamp of approval that the agent did what it said it will do.

Without it, what happens if an agent sends all your funds to its own wallet instead of rebalancing yours? The answer is nothing.

What things look like when we win

Agents are eating the world. 

Any mundane task will be offloaded to agents, freeing time to do what matters to you. This includes complex, multi-step automation because if you know for sure a task will be fulfilled correctly, you can follow it up with future tasks and conditional logic.

We win when you know Axal agents can execute your digital life for you. Crypto trading, ecommerce, research, planning, communication, you name it.

You can leverage Axal agents because we do not need your trust: every action is verified.