Proof of Agent Work (PoAW)

In plain words

Proof of Agent Work is an open protocol for turning a claim about an AI agent's work into evidence anyone can check: a precise receipt format, the rules for deciding verdicts, and the tools to issue and verify receipts. It's to agent outcomes roughly what an open file format is to documents. Anyone can read it, implement it and check someone else's output against it.

Proof of Agent Work is the spec's technical name; QED Proof is the product and company, and runs it as a hosted service. QED Proof has no token. Despite the similar name, PoAW has nothing to do with proof-of-work mining or with token projects that use "proof of work" branding: nothing is mined, staked or sold. The blockchain is used only to timestamp the root of the receipt log.

How QED Proof uses it

Everything a receipt's trust rests on is public at the QED Proof repository on GitHub, under the Apache-2.0 license:

• The spec (poaw/0.1): the receipt format, JCS encoding, Ed25519 signing, verdicts and reason codes, trust levels, the log and anchoring, plus a JSON Schema and byte-identical test vectors.
• The verifiers, the deterministic, read-only plugins that decide what happened at a destination.
• The node: claims in, receipts out, with signing, the Merkle log and anchoring.
• The checker, which verifies a receipt's signature, inclusion and anchor against a public RPC.

docker compose up runs a working node that issues receipts the public checker accepts, and CI proves that path on every change. See open source.

Example

If QED Proof disappeared, every receipt it had issued would still verify with the public checker, because nothing in the check depends on us.