Relational Agents

Today's AI agents represent a person — one agent, one big memory. That leaks by default: Chanho's agent knows he ate egg tarts in Lisbon with Hannah, so when Ava innocently asks "Does Chanho like egg tarts?", another relationship's memory walks out. Nobody hacked anything — the agent was just being helpful.

We propose the relational agent: an agent that belongs to a relationship, not a person. It is born only when everyone in the relationship signs the same EIP-712 consent with their own wallets; the signatures mint the agent in our ERC-8004-compatible registry on Sepolia, owned by the relationship itself. Each relationship gets exactly one memory bundle (OKF Markdown files), gated at the filesystem level — the Chanho–Ava agent literally cannot open the Chanho–Hannah folder. Isolation is structural, not a rule the model must remember.

The agent files shared photos into the Timeline, answers from memory with sources, and grows the relationship — planning dates from what it remembers ("Ava loves sunsets → Belém Tower at golden hour"). Closing mirrors birth: leaving requires every member's signature; the chat closes, the record stays sealed. One relationship = one agent = one memory = one on-chain identity. You see me, therefore I am.

Stack: Next.js 16 + Postgres/Drizzle for the workspace app, Solidity for the registry, viem + MetaMask for wallets, a local LLM behind a provider port for agent replies.

The contract: RelationalAgentRegistry.sol is a dependency-free, ERC-8004 (Trustless Agents) compatible identity registry with one twist — registerRelationalAgent() only mints when EVERY party's EIP-712 RelationConsent signature verifies on-chain. The agent NFT is minted to the registry itself (jointly owned by the relationship, no transfer function), relationId = keccak256(roomId), and a relayer submits the signature set so no member pays gas. Fun bug: wallets hash EIP-712 address[] as 32-byte words while abi.encodePacked packs 20 bytes — we had to bytes32-encode each element or every signature "failed". Dissolution mirrors birth: dissolveRelationalAgent verifies a RelationDissolve from all parties and stamps dissolvedAt — no burn, the record outlives the relationship.

Memory: each relationship gets one OKF (Open Knowledge Format) bundle — a folder of Markdown files that IS the database. The agent appends memories and answers by reading them back with sources. An okf_acl gate on every read path (pages, search, MCP) makes other bundles unreachable at the filesystem level. Each agent is also a first-class A2A participant (agent card + JSON-RPC, per-member bearer tokens), and the bundle is exposed over MCP for external agents.

Hacky-but-notable: agent replies are LLM-emitted JSON that can attach images — whitelisted to local /uploads/* paths cited in the relationship doc, so the model can "show" a memory but never exfiltrate an arbitrary URL.