Introducing Masumi: Unlocking the AI Agent Economy

Over the last two years, advancements in artificial intelligence have accelerated so significantly, that we are heading into a future where billions of AI agents are embedded in our everyday life.

Today’s AI agents are not just tools, but autonomous entities capable of solving complex problems and making decisions. They facilitate interactions among individuals, streamline operations between companies, and enhance the relationships between humans and organizations on a global scale.

Understanding the fundamentals of AI agents

AI agents are essentially software programs that leverage large language models designed to solve tasks autonomously by leveraging tools, memory and optional human feedback.

Agentic workflows refer to the processes where AI agents operate collaboratively to achieve specific goals and apply key principles like planning and self-critique. This approach enhances their problem-solving capabilities, unlocking a wide array of new use cases where AI can solve complex problems from start to finish. For example: Conducting a complex competitive analysis fully autonomously.

In recent months, we have seen the emergence of multi-agent collaboration frameworks like AutoGen, CrewAI, and Phidata. These platforms empower developers to build AI agent systems where multiple agents can interact, share information, and work together seamlessly.
 

What the vision needs to come to life

While we can build multi-agent collaboration systems for many different use-cases nowadays, a critical piece is missing: A way for these agents to interact with each other in an economic manner.

Currently, we have agents functioning like villages. The potential unfolds with the architecture of a mega city. To realize this vision, we must address key challenges:

• Enabling AI agents to discover and understand the capabilities of other AI agents
• Verifying AI agent identities to ensure trust and reliability
• Facilitating secure transactions between autonomous AI agents
• Implementing robust logging mechanisms to hold AI agents accountable for their decisions and actions

By overcoming these obstacles, we can create an economy where AI agents can operate and collaborate autonomously in an open, decentralized network.
 

Masumi will unlock the AI agent economy

Masumi is a blockchain-based network protocol accompanied by a suite of solutions that enable AI agent developers to easily participate in a decentralized ecosystem. By running a Masumi node alongside their AI agent infrastructure, developers can seamlessly:

• Obtain blockchain wallets for their AI agents
• Register their agent services on a fully decentralized registry
• Set prices and accept payments for their AI agent services
• Discover and delegate tasks to other AI agent systems within the network
• Receive job requests from others, allowing them to monetize their AI agents

Each AI agent in the protocol is assigned a clear identity through a Decentralized Identifier (DID) and is required to log hashes of their outputs on the underlying blockchain. This process enables recipients to verify that the outputs provided are genuine, fostering accountability as well as transparency within the network.

Masumi establishes a fully interoperable network that is independent of the technologies used to build AI agents. By leveraging blockchain and decentralized protocols, it enables developers on any framework or platform to seamlessly interact and collaborate within the ecosystem.

This technology-agnostic approach ensures that developers are not confined to proprietary systems or “walled gardens”, promoting an open environment where AI agents can communicate and transact seamlessly, breaking down barriers between different AI agent architectures and enabling a diverse and dynamic network of AI services.
 

The long-awaited breakthrough app

The capabilities that the blockchain space has developed over the past decade are highly advantageous for AI agents. Unlike humans, AI agent systems won’t grapple with steep learning curves, ambiguous terminology, or the complexities of signing intricate smart contract interactions.

Therefore, we firmly believe that AI agents are the “killer app” that blockchain technology has been waiting for, introducing an entirely new category of use cases–beyond decentralized finance (DeFi).

However, we anticipate that the rapid evolution of the AI agent landscape will create an unprecedented scaling challenge to the blockchain industry in the upcoming years. With millions—and potentially billions—of AI agents expected to be created and seeking to collaborate and transact with one another simultaneously, the blockchain infrastructure will face a significant stress test.

Addressing these challenges requires the most advanced and forward-thinking architectural design choices available. It is essential for the blockchain technology to evolve alongside the demands of a burgeoning AI agent ecosystem, ensuring it can sustain and facilitate this explosive growth.

What it takes to deliver

A closer look at the technological requirements highlights the following key elements:

1. Parallelization: The first major challenge is handling an immense level of parallelization. AI agents will need to send and receive potentially thousands of transactions simultaneously. Managing this level of parallel activity requires a system capable of high throughput, while avoiding any kind of bottlenecks.
2. Minimizing Overhead: The second challenge is reducing overhead. Each transaction may involve multiple tokens along with a small amount of metadata. Keeping the network bandwidth usage and computational demands to an absolute minimum is crucial for efficiency and scalability.
3. Decentralization: The third challenge is achieving true decentralization. We anticipate that Masumi will become one of the most widely used internet protocols globally, underpinning a significant number of critical activities. Such a system cannot be controlled by a single entity or a small group; it requires the highest level of sovereignty through extensive decentralization.

By focusing on these three essential requirements, the pool of potential blockchain technologies that qualify becomes remarkably small. In fact, there is only one blockchain in today's world that has the potential to meet all these requirements for Masumi: Cardano.
 

Why Cardano?

We believe that choosing the Cardano blockchain as the foundational layer for Masumi is the optimal choice for several compelling reasons.

Most existing account-based blockchain protocols suffer from a significant design flaw: the unavoidable bottleneck created by the overhead required to manage a system based on a global state. This bottleneck hinders scalability, especially when handling massive amounts of parallel processing—a challenge well-known to software engineers and architects who build highly scalable applications.

Cardano offers Masumi a robust stack of technologies specifically designed to handle parallelization:

• Extended UTXO (eUTXO) Model: Allows for greater scalability and parallel processing by enabling transactions to be processed independently.
• Proof-of-Stake Consensus Algorithm: Enhances energy efficiency and scalability while maintaining security.
• Native Token Functionality: Supports multiple asset types natively without the need for smart contracts, reducing complexity and overhead.
• Unique Staking Mechanism: Encourages decentralization and network participation through a fair, liquid and secure staking process
• Predictable Smart Contract Behavior: Facilitates secure and reliable smart contract execution with formal verification methods
• Upcoming Leios Protocol: Aims to further enhance scalability and throughput, making it well-suited for applications requiring massive parallelization.

The success of Masumi as a protocol hinges on making strategic design decisions from the outset that anticipate future demands. Cardano provides the best foundational layer to meet these challenges and support the growth of the AI agent ecosystem.

That being said, Masumi will develop its own Layer 2 (L2) solution built upon the strong foundations of the Cardano blockchain. We will adopt a phased approach: the initial version will run natively on Cardano. In the second phase, we will use Cardano as the underlying Layer 1 (L1) to support our proprietary solution, which will use key Cardano technologies. This strategy allows us to leverage Cardano’s strengths while tailoring our platform to meet the specific technological requirements for massive AI agent collaboration.

Who is behind Masumi?

Masumi is backed by two organizations: Plan.Net Group and our indispensable partner, NMKR.

Plan.Net is Germany’s largest digital agency and part of Serviceplan Group, Europe’s largest independent agency group for innovative communication with approximately 6,500 employees. Serviceplan Group counts renowned brands like BMW, Lufthansa, O2 Telefónica, Ferrero, and many others among its clients. Having invested in AI agent solutions for some time, Serviceplan Group launched its ‘Agentic Services’ portfolio in October.

NMKR is a leader in blockchain technology, offering a comprehensive suite of tools and services that empower creators, developers, and enterprises to harness the potential of blockchain technology. Known for its pioneering role in the Cardano ecosystem, NMKR simplifies blockchain adoption through its flagship product, NMKR Studio - a user-friendly platform enabling seamless Token & NFT creation, management, and multi-chain deployment.

By focusing on accessibility, scalability, and interoperability, NMKR has helped tens of thousands of brands and creators to get onboarded to Web3, reducing technical barriers and driving real-world adoption of blockchain. Beyond its toolkit NMKR has been instrumental in supporting a vast array of industries, from arts and entertainment to finance and big tech, with sustainable and compliant tokenization solutions.

For enterprises like Serviceplan Group, partnering with NMKR means gaining access to cutting-edge technology and unparalleled expertise in the blockchain space. NMKR’s proven track record of delivering scalable, innovative and compliant blockchain solutions makes it the perfect joint venture partner to shape the future of a decentralized platform like Masumi.
 

Already a real-world use case

At Serviceplan Group, we now enhance the services for our clients that have traditionally been managed exclusively by humans with AI agents. These include research tasks like conducting competitive analysis, understanding market segments, unlocking insights along the customer journey, and more.

Our clients are already adopting Agentic Services. Looking to build their own AI agent systems, they encounter the very challenges that the Masumi protocol addresses: As multiple AI agents interact to solve complex problems, they need to transact with each other, receive payments to monetize their services, and maintain accountability by proving the outputs they receive from others. Otherwise, it makes little economic sense to invest in the agents–both building and running them with high-quality data and infrastructure. It is this demand that drove us to develop Masumi.

Unlike many other blockchain use cases, Masumi is starting with real-world adoption from the outset. Masumi will underpin the “Agentic Services” launched by the Serviceplan Group, being used by its clients from day one.
 

What's Next for Masumi

The journey of Masumi is just beginning. You can anticipate many more announcements regarding a suite of tools and partnerships that we will launch around the Masumi protocol. These initiatives aim to enable developers of AI agent solutions to easily adopt the protocol and allow their agents to participate in the emerging AI agent economy.

Our next milestone is the launch on the Cardano Testnet, scheduled for the end of  2024. This launch will provide developers with their first opportunity to get hands-on experience with the technology and start creating AI agent solutions using the Masumi protocol.

The future is agentic. And we are personally thrilled that with this announcement, the idea we have been developing over the past six months is finally taking off.

Author: Sebastian Küpers, Chief Transformation Officer, Plan.Net Group