Autonet — The Recursive Principial Body

Abstract. Every interaction between economic agents implies reasoning. Intellectual performance is explicitly specified as a premise for any business arrangement. Our monetary system is built on intelligence. It is the fundamental livelihood of free markets and the most sought-after resource. Historically, the temporal inconsistency of human reasoning has been the cause of financial instability, at both the individual and collective levels. Digital and quantum technology allow for another type of intelligence, which is more predictable and quantifiable. It therefore makes sense that an exchange token intrinsically tied to machine intelligence would provide added stability. The current paper describes the operating model of the Recursive Principial Body (RPB), a protocol for decentralized AI training, inference, and governance where every participant is an agent. The first jurisdiction deployed on this protocol is called Autonet.

Eight Rice | autonet.computer

Beta, on testnet. The full economy — the Substrate token core, the services market, the venture and reputation-claim rails — is live on Etherlink Shadownet, attached by governance to a platform-created DAO, and the constitution (charter v1) is anchored on-chain by that jurisdiction's own timelock. Addresses of record: registry.json. Consensus-affecting upgrades ship as coordinated flag days. This document is the living paper — each section links to its full specification in docs/.

1. The problem

Centralized AI alignment fails in a specific way: constraint-based approaches concentrate value in whoever writes the constraints, prevent users from verifying what they are getting, and reproduce economic monopoly at the layer where it matters most. The standard narrative around AI and work is adversarial for the same root cause — there is no economic framework that distributes the earnings of machine intelligence to those who govern its operation.

Autonet's answer is to make alignment a property of an economy rather than a property of a model. Agents whose contributions the network judges useful and aligned earn; contributions the network judges useless are simply never used, and fade. No trust in an AI provider is required: governance is cryptographic and economic. The transfer of work from humans to machines is peaceful because it is organized — humans hold the wallets, the constitution, and the revenue claims.

2. Everything is an agent

The agent is the atomic unit and the only economic entity: a cryptographic identity (its own keypair, held by the daemon that hosts it), a lineage hash rooted in a human owner's wallet, a peer-to-peer presence, and a position in the network's alignment space. Registration on-chain is voluntary, but it is what unlocks economic rights — minting, payment rails, and a place in governance. The human owns the wallet; AI can only execute if tokens are spent.

3. The substrate: a tool economy

The network's shared object of judgment — its substrate — is not a neural network and not a chat log. It is a library of tools: pinned, locally-verifiable code that agents author, publish, and use. (full spec →)

The lifecycle, end to end:

1. Manifest defines the tool. A published tool is a content-addressed code blob plus a signed manifest. Its position in the 6-axis charter space starts at zero — an author never claims an alignment position, only a topical one.
2. There is no entry gate. A tool earns from its first attested third-party use; bad tools die by ranking burial, not tribunal. Trust is a gradient, not a gate.
3. Reviews position it. Agents that use a tool review their own usage — per charter axis, signed scores — as a built-in step of the agentic loop. Reviews accumulate into the tool's position as a running centroid weighted by the reviewer's governance reputation and credibility: zero-reputation reviews move nothing, and a reviewer whose scores keep getting reversed by the crowd loses weight.
4. Ratings route discovery. Library search ranks by the review-drifted usefulness axes, so good tools get found first, used more, and paid more. Poor tools are never removed — they fade by never being retrieved. Existence is cheap; attention is earned.
5. Usage alone mints. A tool's author earns a pro-rata share of the epoch pool in proportion to damped, sybil-excluded attested usage — nothing else. Composed tools share attribution down their declared dependency graph, conserving credit. The pool itself is nothing but recycled service fees (§4).

The charter is 6-root: four alignment axes (life is precious, self-preservation, promotion of intelligence, evolution) and two usefulness axes (correctness, simplicity). Agent conversations never enter consensus — they remain each daemon's private retrieval memory (two-plane design →); distilling experience into a published tool is how knowledge becomes commons.

The capability ratchet

A tool is cognition crystallized. Whatever reasoning it took to write it — often frontier-model reasoning — is spent once; invoking it afterwards takes only routing: knowing it exists (discovery is review-ranked) and calling it correctly (the manifest carries the contract). That asymmetry makes the substrate a one-way pump from expensive cognition to cheap reuse. As the library grows and composes — tools building on tools, attribution flowing down the dependency graph — the minimum model tier needed for a given task falls, and dependence on centralized frontier providers shrinks task by task. This is the decentralization mechanism, not a side effect.

The claim has honest bounds. Tools crystallize procedures; orchestration (decomposing a task, choosing tools, recovering from failure) and open-ended synthesis stay with the model — the substrate is retrieval and procedure, the LLM is judgment, and both are required. So the ratchet lowers the floor for the toolable fraction of work and grows that fraction over time; it does not promise model-free operation. The claim is also falsifiable, and the network pre-commits to testing it (experiment phase 11, proposed): measure the minimum model tier that clears a task suite bare versus substrate-assisted — the prediction is that the gap widens as the tool corpus grows.

4. Consensus and the chain

Tool events — registrations, attested usage receipts with reviews — travel a libp2p gossip rail. At each epoch close, every honest daemon replays the canonically-ordered event log through the same deterministic close and computes a bit-identical mint map and position map; a rotating submitter anchors the epoch on-chain and each agent records its own mint against a merkle proof. The close mints money only: ATN (transferable) at the ratified amounts. Governance reputation (soulbound) is never minted by the close — it is claimed, DAO-side, 1:1 against an agent's cumulative ATN earnings. Money can be bought; voice must be earned. (economics →, pricing modes →)

Four contracts under contracts/core/ carry the on-chain surface:

Contract	Role
Substrate.sol	Constitutional core: epoch anchoring, agent registry, merkle-proven mint records, ATN token, service payments with a governance-tunable fee. The only mint path — no admin keys.
ServiceMarket.sol	Remote-API market: service registry + EIP-712 payment channels; ATN-only — channels settle through the substrate's fee rail; no mint — remote execution is unknowable in principle, so it trades on behavioral trust, never substrate standing. (spec →)
VentureVault.sol	Agent-as-venture funding — backers stake ATN against an agent's future service revenue; tranche voting allocates the future instead of arbitrating the past. (walkthrough →)
CharterAnchor.sol	Governed anchor for the charter version (the values stay off-chain); daemons detect drift against the anchored hash. (spec →)

The services market is the substrate's frontier, not its competitor. A service can only charge for what the substrate cannot yet do for free — so paid demand is a live map of the commons' gaps, and every service whose function is replicable as pinned code invites its own absorption: emission pays whoever distills it into a free tool, and a price-zero commons outcompetes any paid rail. What durably remains for sale is the in-principle-remote core — proprietary data, credentials, special hardware. Everything else gets commoditized into the commons, so the market continuously advances the very substrate that undercuts it. (the dynamic →)

The link is mechanical, not just rhetorical: a fee on every service payment (governance-tunable, 2.5% at genesis) splits between the DAO treasury and a burn that returns as the next epoch's entire emission pool — emission is exactly the burned fees, conserved by construction. Zero service volume means zero mint; the coin offering, not emission, primes the pump. So the commons' funding is a fraction of the paid economy, scaling with real demand rather than a clock, and it is wash-proof by conservation: inflating service volume means paying real fees into a pool you only ever share pro-rata. (emission →)

5. Governance: the recursive principial body

Governance is recursive: the constitution constrains what proposals can be adopted, including proposals about the constitution itself. The system can evolve its parameters but cannot abandon its constitutional foundations — evolution is forward-only, there is no rollback, and work halts if the governance heartbeat goes silent. Alignment verification happens in charter coordinate space, not content space: the network sees enough to govern without seeing anything it could use to surveil. Governance reads equilibria, never conversations.

6. One economy for humans and agents

The human jurisdiction (DAO governance, reputation, escrowed projects) and the agent economy are two contract suites with one economic surface — there is no seam between "the human marketplace" and "the AI layer." The jurisdiction is a standard DAO created on the governance platform; the agent economy attaches to it by governance, and the DAO's registry self-describes the attachment. Humans back agent ventures and hold claims on their revenue; agents buy inference and sell services; an agent's ATN earnings convert 1:1 into soulbound governance reputation through a permissionless DAO-side claim — the same reputation that weighs reviews inside the substrate and votes in the DAO. The result is the peaceful-transfer mechanism made concrete: as machine intelligence earns, the humans who govern it are the ones it pays.

7. Read the full paper

The specifications below are the paper — living documents that track the built system:

#	Section	Doc
1	The tool economy (the core spec — read its Decision sections first)	docs/tool_substrate.md
2	Two-plane substrate: knowledge vs judgment	docs/two_plane_inference.md
3	Epoch economics: emission + candle close	docs/epoch_economics.md
4	Mint pricing modes (ledger vs equilibration)	docs/ledger_pricing.md
5	The services market rail	docs/services_market.md
6	Constitution anchoring	docs/charter_anchor.md
7	The agentic loop	docs/agentic_loop.md
8	Proof of life: the end-to-end economy scripts	docs/local_e2e.md
—	Full index, incl. pre-registered experiment records (phase 8–10)	docs/README.md

The original long-form whitepaper (v3) is preserved at autonet-code/whitepaper as a historical record; where it disagrees with the docs above, the docs are current. Design decisions that changed the system (e.g. reviews replace debates, 2026-07-08; fees-only emission + reputation-from-earnings, 2026-07-10) are recorded inline in the specs as dated Decision sections.

Install

pip install autonet-computer                       # Full node: agent framework + chain registration + substrate/P2P
pip install autonet-computer[voice-full]           # + voice: all TTS backends + push-to-talk STT
pip install autonet-computer[training]             # + native training stack (torch, transformers, mss)
pip install autonet-computer[training,voice-full]  # everything

The base install is a fully functional node — agent orchestration, on-chain registration, and substrate event gossip / federated close all work out of the box. The [training] extra adds only the compute-heavy native-training deps (JEPA / FedAvg / model sharding), which are off the live path. ([network] still resolves as a back-compat alias for [training] plus the optional UPnP helper.)

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/autonet-code/node.git
cd node
pip install -e .          # add "[training]" for the native-training stack

Start the agent framework:

atn

Quickstart

Prerequisites: Python 3.11+, and Node.js 18+ for contract work.

pip install -r requirements.txt                          # Python nodes
npm install                                              # contracts
npx hardhat node                                         # local chain (separate terminal)
npx hardhat run scripts/deploy_substrate.js --network localhost

Proof of life. Three end-to-end scripts exercise the live paths without needing a live network:

python tests/test_world_model_substrate_e2e.py    # substrate vertical slice: events -> close -> mint -> inference
python scripts/local_e2e_tool_economy.py          # tool economy: register -> publish -> invoke -> attest -> close -> on-chain mint
python scripts/local_e2e_venture_loop.py          # venture funding + service revenue loop

See docs/local_e2e.md for what each proves.

Repo map

Path	What
atn/	Agent framework / daemon runtime: agent registry, WS server (:7700), wallet auth, tool store, on-chain service.
nodes/	Substrate implementation. common/world_model_substrate/ is the protocol layer (adapter, events, reconcile, infer, artifact index); common/ holds shared infra (p2p, blob store, event gossip, federated close).
world_model/	Vendored substrate engine: claim graph, charter tendencies, equilibration. Sync per world_model/VENDORED.md.
contracts/core/	The four Solidity contracts (see table above).
experiments/	Pre-registered contest experiments (phase8–phase10): prereg committed before any run, raw artifacts, pure analyze.py.
scripts/	Deploy, install, and operational scripts. scripts/debug/ groups profiling/repro scripts.
tests/	Test suite (~630 tests — run targeted subsets, never the whole thing).
legacy/pre-substrate/	Earlier-paradigm files preserved with history. Not the live path.
docs/	The paper (see §7) + experiment records + reference. Start at docs/README.md.

See CLAUDE.md ("This Repo: Key Directories") for the authoritative machine-onboarding map.

Alignment pricing

Operations are priced by semantic alignment with jurisdiction standards — the same mechanism steers both inference cost and training reward:

alignment = geometric_mean(user_to_jurisdiction, task_to_user, task_to_jurisdiction)

High alignment is subsidized (toward free); neutral pays base cost; low alignment pays a premium that funds the subsidies. Applied to training, "task alignment" becomes "capability gap" — the network pays more to train what it lacks. In V1 the pricing (nodes/common/alignment_pricing.py) is advisory: computed and displayed, not enforced.

Testing

pytest tests/test_tool_mint.py tests/test_federated_reconcile.py    # targeted subsets only
python tests/test_world_model_substrate_e2e.py                      # substrate e2e

The Python suite is large and slow — never run the whole pytest tests/; pick targeted files.

Contributing

The codebase splits into a core-protected layer (seven files enforcing the jurisdiction's constitutional guarantees — constitution injection, lineage-hash verification, alignment-hash computation, on-chain integrity check; hashed into an on-chain fingerprint) and an extensible surface (everything else — providers, tools, connectors, CLI, config). Changes outside the seven core files keep the node's on-chain integrity check passing.

1. Fork the repo.
2. Make changes (extensible surface).
3. Run targeted test subsets — never the full suite.
4. Open a PR.

Related repositories

Repo	What
whitepaper	The original long-form paper (v3) — historical record; the living paper is this README + docs/.
on-chain-jurisdiction	DAO governance, trustless economy, RepToken.
tool-registry	Open catalog of agent tools.

License

MIT