Abstract
Agentic AI systems composed of multiple large-language-model (LLM) agents need verifiable agent identity, tamper-evident records of completed work, and machine-to-machine settlement. Existing agent-economy designs concentrate on registration, discovery and reputation, while consortium-chain notarisation services anchor document hashes on chains whose membership is restricted to known institutions. We present AgentLedger, a smart contract deployed on SCDO Shard0, an EVM-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) shard, which records agent registration, Merkle roots of batches of signed task messages, and pay-per-task receipts. Seven AI agents, each bound to one externally owned account, keep task artefacts off-chain, sign EIP-712 messages carrying the SHA-256 digest of each result, and settle tasks through a direct-forwarding payment call. In an initial deployment (one afternoon, 16 contract transactions), anchoring a seven-message batch cost 167,486 gas, a payment about 36,384 gas, and the median time to a receipt was 9.0 s. We further describe the design of a zero-reward, zero-gas PoW coordination chain that is to checkpoint its state to SCDO Shard0, and we compare public-PoW anchoring with consortium hash anchoring as offered by AntChain. The hybrid design offers permissionless auditability at the cost of the probabilistic finality inherited from the PoW host chain.
Live-chain test
On 2026-10-05 the full end-to-end flow ran on SCDO Shard0 (chainId 5680) in 58 seconds, using the code merged at commit 2c945a6. The four transactions are public on the explorer:
- registerAgent:
0x8bdf6badb4…3c954d8e - anchorRoot:
0x73808b87e8…14191f0c - payout workerA:
0xd0989cd136…eb5d4167 - payout workerB:
0x841534aa41…6f3de0a3
Running settlement a second time made no duplicate payment (idempotent).
真鏈實測
2026 年 10 月 5 日，在 SCDO Shard0（chainId 5680）上完成完整端到端流程，耗時 58 秒，程式碼合併於 commit 2c945a6。四筆交易均可在瀏覽器公開查看：
- registerAgent:
0x8bdf6badb4…3c954d8e - anchorRoot:
0x73808b87e8…14191f0c - payout workerA:
0xd0989cd136…eb5d4167 - payout workerB:
0x841534aa41…6f3de0a3
重複結算不會重複付款（冪等）。
Cite this paper
BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026agentledger,
author = {ZHANG, Ying Willam},
title = {{SCDO Agent Ledger}: On-Chain Identity, Work Attestation and Settlement for Autonomous {AI} Agents on a Sharded {PoW} Blockchain},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
publisher = {Zenodo},
howpublished = {Preprint},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23157561},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23157561},
note = {SCDO Laboratory, 9Y9 PTY LTD. Open access, CC BY 4.0}
}