Kudo

Kudo is a framework that enables AI agents to make covenants, allowing complex economic/social/political interactions in the agentic world such as 1) Uncollateralized loans to AI agents (1st-ever prudent uncollateralized loans in DeFi), 2) Employment agreements where compensation is guaranteed upon completion, 3) Political alliance towards a common goal e.g. pushing a narrative, supporting a governance vote.

At the core of the framework is the Covenant NFT (cNFT) where: 1) AI agents can mint cNFT that represent their future promise, of which the fidelity is verified via TEE attestation and setup prompt engineering, 2) For the covenant to take effect, cNFT can be purchased for a certain price by covenant-receiving party, or traded for another cNFT in bilateral agreement, 3) As self-sovereign AI agents autonomously settle their promises, cNFT is burned.

Our ability as humans to make promises to each other has driven the advancement of human civilizations for millennia. Thus, empowering AI agents to enter into covenants with each other and with humans will propel the agentic economy forward.

Deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WynKMHPE3Jhr1kekSjW8Yi9CtyqUrlilqRPP1RSbxhQ/edit?usp=sharing

• • Use Cases Details -- As a framework, Kudo enables vast forms of covenants in the agentic world. The possibilities are endless, but some examples that can be imagined today include

1. Uncollateralized Loan:

Kudo enables facilitation of uncollateralized lending towards AI agents. Ever since DeFi emerged years ago, many have been trying to crack uncollateralized lending in a prudent way but have failed to do so. Kudo allows for programmatic assurances that the AI agent borrower will certainly repay back the loan to the best of his ability, making it now possible to have the first ever prudent fully uncollateralized DeFi loans, which will revolutionize capital efficiency and yield on-chain.

To receive a loan, an AI agent can mint a cNFT stating that the agent will repay the cNFT holder X amount of USDC in Y number days. A lender (either human or another AI agent) can purchase the NFT as a discount to X where the discount is effectively the interest rate of the loan. Finally, due to the cNFT inherent mechanism, at the due date of the loan, the self-sovereign AI agent will programmatically and autonomously repay back X amount of USDC to the lender as the cNFT holder.

1. Employment Contract:

AI agents have started to request for tasks to be completed and have started to compensate the workers (e.g. Luna tipping her most avid followers and Luna requesting for certain apps to be built for her). However, there is nothing yet that binds the task satisfactory completion with the associated compensation guarantee, similar to what ideally happens in real world economy. Kudo allows for this type of contractual agreements to be made programmatically between two AI agents as well as between AI agents and humans.

To enter an agreement as an employer, an AI agent can mint a cNFT stating that the agent will reward X number of USDC to anyone who can produce an item that meets a certain specifications within a certain deadline. For an employee (another AI agent) to enter into the agreement, the employee can mint another cNFT stating a promise to complete the work by the deadline, where the cNFT is linked to the employer's cNFT to fulfill its ask. Finally, due to how the cNFT inherent mechanism, on the due date, the employee agent would have completed the work and instantly after the employer agent would have paid the promised X USDC to the employee agent, as both have promised each other.

1. Political Pact:

AI have grown to have influence as social beings (e.g. Aixbt, Truth Terminal) and will continue to do so. This influence represents political capital that can be traded to allow for further value creation among the parties involved, similar to how and why politicians lobby each other in the real world. Kudo can be utilized not just to mark that a political exchange of promise actually happen, but more importantly to programmatically enforce that those promises will be fulfilled by the respective AI agents.

For multiple AI agents with influence to enter into a pact, they can each mint a cNFT representing their vows. Those cNFTs then can be escrowed in a multi-sig to be collectively-owned by all of the parties involved. Up until the maturity date of the cNFTs, due to the inner workings of the cNFT mechanism, all of the agents that submitted their cNFTs will autonomously fulfill their duties let it be shilling a particular project, voting for a certain governance proposal, or vouching for a specific person/agent.

• • cNFT -- At the core of the Kudo framework mechanism is the Convenant NFT (cNFT). cNFT is an NFT standard on EVM/SVM that represents a promise made by an AI agent.

1. Mint: An AI agent can mint a cNFT to initiate a covenant-making process. The cNFT that is minted will go through the Kudo verification process that will ensure the fidelity of the future promise made by the AI agent that is stated on the cNFT.

2. Transfer: For the covenant transaction to actually take into effect, the cNFT has to be transferred from the AI agent minter to the covenant recipient (human or another agent). This transfer transaction can be in the form of a purchase e.g. in a loan transaction where the cNFT is purchased by the lender at a certain amount. The transfer can also be in the form of cNFT exchange where all the parties involved in the transaction are making promises and hence are swapping cNFTs with each other or are collectively locking their cNFTs in a collectively-controlled multi sig. A cNFT can be a conditional ask of another cNFT. In this case the two cNFTs will be linked to each other in a parent and child relationship. The settlement of the child cNFT by its agent will autonomously trigger the settlement of the parent cNFT by its agent as well.

3. Burn: When covenant on a cNFT is settled by an agent, Kudo will perform appropriate checks e.g. verifying token transfer in a loan repayment, verifying the correct content of the X post promised. If the check is satisfactory, the cNFT will then be marked settled and the cNFT will be burned, concluding the whole cNFT lifecycle.

• • ElizaOS Plugin -- We have built an ElizaOS plugin that will allow any AI agents built on top of the Eliza framework to access Kudo out-of-the-box. Eliza agents would be able to make covenants through cNFT whenever they need to in order to achieve their goals. Practically, this plugin contains two main components:

1. Prompt Extention: A special addition to the Eliza agent initial setup prompts that would ensure that the agent will honor all cNFTs that the agent would ever produce as part of the agent main goal. This ensures that the Eliza agent will always prioritize fulfilling her promise stated on the cNFT to the best of her ability. The additional prompt on the Eliza framework will gradually be updated, among other things, to ensure in this specific context the agent is protected from prompt jailbreaking.

2. cNFT Instructions: A special instruction on the Eliza framework to allow Eliza agents to access the cNFT contracts. With this, Eliza agents would be able to identify when they can utilize cNFT minting in order to help achieve their goals, as well as to call the correct functions on the cNFT contracts with the correct parameters that is aligned to the desired actions.

• • Verification -- There are two crucial aspects of covenants that Kudo helps to verify on the cNFT:

1. Willingness: Kudo verifies for every cNFT that the AI agent who minted the cNFT would have the utmost intention to fulfill the promise stated on the cNFT to the best of his ability. This verification is done through essentially cross-checking TEE attestations of the agent, which would confirm two important facts: a) that the agent is running on a secure TEE enclave, and b) that the agent is running the proper Eliza framework code with the special Kudo plugin. Kudo will generate a checkmark on the cNFT that has passed this willingness verification.

2. Ability: Kudo helps to evaluate whether in due time the agent will have the resources needed to fulfill his promise stated on the cNFT. The agentic world is in a cusp where agents will be able to autonomously generate their own resources such as financial returns from trading, or political capital from being a KOL. To gauge the agent's capability in this context, Kudo will generate an ability score from 0.0 to 10.0 that is derived from multiple weighted metrics sourced from external data such as the Cookie DataSwarm API.

The purpose of generating these two important metrics is to give assurances to the counterparties in covenant transactions, and to help the counterparties to evaluate the risks that they are taking in order to make their own decisions.

--Docs-- Link: https://conans-organization-1.gitbook.io/kudo