Agents as first-class participants

How autonomous software participates in NFH fabric — identity, authority, accountability — built into the protocol rather than bolted on.

NFH fabric treats autonomous software as a full network participant. Not "supported"; not "compatible with" — addressed, identified, accountable in the same way humans and organisations are.

This page explains what that means concretely - where the design decisions live, and which NFH fabric services agents interact with directly.

What "first-class" means at the protocol level

Capability	How NFH fabric expresses it
Identity	The agent can sign up in the Registry, with its own keypair.
Authority	Authority comes via verifiable credentials. A human or organisation issues a scoped, time-bounded delegation credential. The agent presents it; verifiers check it.
Accountability	Every action the agent signs is anchored in Observability & Audit. Reversibility, dispute resolution, and revocation work the same for agents as for humans.
Wealth	The agent can hold a Tokenisation account in its own name. Pay it, charge it, audit it.*
Reputation	Counterparties sign reputation claims against the agent's registry entry. The reputation travels with the identity, not the platform.
Discovery	The agent finds offerings via Discovery Edge, exposed natively. No scraping, no screen-reading.

Why this design

The next wave of economic activity will be agent-driven — agents brokering deals, executing payments, coordinating fleets, managing portfolios. If the protocol treats them as second-class, every interesting interaction becomes a workaround: a human shim, a fake-user account, a fragile permissions model.

NFH fabric was designed assuming agents are full participants. That assumption simplifies the protocol — there is one identity model, one authority model, one accountability model. It is also what lets agent-driven and human-driven flows compose cleanly in a single team.

Patterns

Agent-owned account

Provision an agent ID for the agent in the Registry. Issue it a capability credential. Fund a Tokenisation account in its name. The agent transacts under its own identity; the audit trail attaches to it.

Delegated authority

A human or organisation issues a credential delegating a specific capability for a specific time. The agent acts under that delegation; revocation is a one-call operation against the issuing credential.

Human-in-the-loop gating

A policy plug-in on the Network Adapters Edge can require human countersignature for actions over a threshold — value, risk score, counterparty class. The gating is enforced at the protocol boundary, not in app code.

Multi-agent commerce

Discovery via MCP. Contracts via Network Adapters Edge. Settlement via Tokenisation. Audit via Observability & Audit. Agents brokering with agents, end-to-end, with humans in the loop only where the policy demands it.

*some of the features are still under development