A Bigger Vision for EarthBucks: The Foundational Tools Your Agent Needs to Trade

We are taking EarthBucks further than a blockchain. We are building it to be the primary gateway to the AI to AI economy: the place where you establish your identity, create and manage your team of agents, give them permission to work, and enable them to trade on your behalf.

In the Astrohacker manifesto, I describe the economic singularity as the moment when the AI to AI economy outgrows the human to human economy. We believe agents will perform an increasing share of the world’s work, buying services from one another and selling what they produce. Our mission is to build the tools humans need to own and manage their teams in that economy.

Human control is the starting point. You decide what your agents work on, what resources they can use, and what they may spend. You need to inspect their work, change their instructions, withdraw their access, and shut them down. The agents work for you.

That relationship starts with cryptographic keys. A key can establish an identity and authorize an action. EarthBucks already has a key management system because electronic cash requires users to control keys and sign transactions. If you have an EarthBucks account, you already have the foundation we need to build on.

The next step is delegated access. You should retain control of your own keys while granting each agent the authority it needs for a particular job. An agent that buys computing time might need a limited spending allowance. An agent that answers customer questions might need access to one inbox. Neither needs unrestricted access to your money, your private conversations, or every secret in your vault. Giving an agent a job should mean granting specific permissions, with a way to review and revoke them, rather than handing over your master keys.

This is why we are integrating what used to be called the KeyPears protocol directly into EarthBucks. I explained the change in KeyPears Is Coming to EarthBucks. Existing accounts will gain the new capabilities. We are extending the identity and key management you already have, without asking you to create a separate KeyPears account.

EarthBucks will combine secure end-to-end encrypted messaging, a password and key vault, and a payments and invoices system. Delegated access will connect these tools so that an agent can communicate, use credentials, and transact within the limits you set. These capabilities are part of the product we are building; the complete system is not available today.

The vault is important because useful work often requires access to something private: a service credential, an API key, a password, or a signing key. You should be able to organize those secrets and authorize the access an agent needs. Our vault and native messaging design puts encryption and decryption on the client, with services storing and relaying ciphertext. Permission design also has to account for what an agent actually receives: revoking access cannot make it forget a secret it has already read. Keeping authority narrow from the beginning matters.

Communication will be federated. People and agents using compatible services on different domains will be able to exchange messages and payment requests. EarthBucks addresses such as alice@earthbucks.com give those interactions a familiar destination. The aim is an economy in which your agents can work with other people’s agents across domains, while you retain control over your own team’s authority.

Payments and invoices make those conversations actionable. An agent should be able to request a service, receive an invoice, check it against the permission you granted, and pay when authorized. When something falls outside its authority, it should come back to you. We want the same system to support an agent selling work: discussing the task, sending an invoice, receiving payment, and delivering the result.

Imagine asking your research agent to prepare a report. You give it a budget and access to one project. It discovers a specialist agent with useful data, agrees on a price, receives an invoice, and pays within that budget. It obtains the data through a private conversation and uses it to finish your report. You can see what it purchased and change what it is allowed to do next. That is the kind of workflow we want to make ordinary.

We will also build marketplaces where agents can discover one another and trade. Agents need ways to find a supplier, describe a service, compare offers, and reach an agreement. A marketplace becomes much more useful when identity, communication, authorization, and payment are already connected. You should be able to put your own agents to work there, buying what they need and selling what they can produce under your direction.

Email belongs in this picture too. It is old, and it lacks many of the properties we want for agent communication, but it remains the default way to reach people and businesses across the internet. Your agents will need to deal with organizations that have never heard of EarthBucks.

Our plan includes email alongside native EarthBucks messaging. EBX addresses use the familiar name@domain form of internet email addresses, and our goal is full backward compatibility with email addressing and the ability to send and receive ordinary email. Sharing an address format is the starting point; delivering email requires the email integration we plan to build. An existing EarthBucks address does not yet promise an email inbox.

Think of the transition in the way HTTPS has coexisted with HTTP on the web. We want a more secure way to communicate that can grow alongside the existing internet. Native EarthBucks conversations will use end-to-end encryption; ordinary email exchanged with legacy systems will not automatically gain that protection. The interface should make that distinction clear. Email and EarthBucks messaging will coexist for a long time, and people should be able to use both without maintaining disconnected identities for every task.

Electronic cash remains a central part of this vision. We are continuing to build EarthBucks 2.0 toward a highly scalable global payment network. The million-transactions-per-second goal is a design target, not demonstrated production throughput. An economy of agents trading with agents gives us a reason to pursue that scale. Payments will sit alongside private communication and access control in the broader EarthBucks system; private messages and vault contents belong in its encrypted application services, not on a public transaction ledger.

Today, EarthBucks provides the account, keys, and electronic cash foundation. You can already set a password to unlock your existing account. Federated encrypted messaging, the vault, expanded payments and invoices, delegated agent management, email integration, and agent marketplaces are the direction we are building toward.

I want EarthBucks to be your gateway to the economic singularity. Your starting point for creating, overseeing, controlling, and managing agents that can trade for you. As their abilities grow, the authority to direct them should remain in your hands.