When people talk about AI agents transacting on-chain, they often skip the most uncomfortable question in the room: who exactly is the actor behind the transaction. With humans, we rely on wallets, signatures, and social assumptions. With AI agents, none of that holds by default. An agent can spin up instantly, act at machine speed, and disappear just as fast. Kite’s idea of an Agent Passport starts from accepting this discomfort rather than hiding it.
The Agent Passport is not an NFT badge or a cosmetic identity layer. It is Kite’s attempt to give AI agents something closer to a cryptographic “existence record” that persists across actions, sessions, and contexts. Instead of treating every transaction as an isolated event, Kite treats each agent as a continuing entity whose actions can be linked, constrained, and evaluated over time.
The reason this matters becomes clear when you imagine agents operating autonomously. An agent might negotiate payments, route liquidity, or coordinate with other agents without human intervention. If something goes wrong, it is not enough to know that “a contract executed correctly.” You need to know which agent initiated the action, under what permissions, and within which boundaries. The Agent Passport is designed to make those questions answerable on-chain.
Kite’s three-layer identity system separates users, agents, and sessions, and the Agent Passport sits at the center of the agent layer. The user is the origin of authority. The session is temporary and disposable. The agent, however, is persistent. The passport binds cryptographic keys, permissions, and behavioral constraints to that agent so it cannot act as an anonymous blur of transactions. Even if sessions rotate or expire, the agent’s identity does not dissolve.
One subtle but important aspect is that the Agent Passport is not meant to make agents “trusted” in a moral sense. It makes them accountable in a technical sense. Accountability here means that actions can be attributed, limited, and, if needed, revoked. If an agent exceeds its mandate, governance or protocol rules can intervene at the identity layer instead of trying to patch behavior after damage has occurred.
This also changes how risk is distributed. In many current systems, risk sits either entirely with the user or entirely with the protocol. Kite’s model allows risk to be scoped to the agent itself. An agent passport can encode what the agent is allowed to spend, which contracts it can interact with, and under what conditions it must stop. That turns identity into a control surface, not just a label.
There is also a coordination angle that often goes unnoticed. When agents interact with other agents, identity becomes the basis for machine-to-machine trust. An agent does not need to “believe” another agent is honest, but it does need cryptographic assurance that the other agent is operating under known rules. The passport provides that shared reference point, enabling agents to coordinate without collapsing everything back to human oversight.
From a governance perspective, the Agent Passport creates a bridge between programmable rules and social decisions. Protocol governance can define what kinds of agent identities are acceptable, what permissions require staking or guarantees, and what behavior triggers penalties. Instead of governing individual transactions, governance can operate at the level of agent classes and identity policies.
The long-term implication is that AI agents stop being treated as disposable scripts and start being treated as on-chain actors with continuity. This is uncomfortable because it forces the ecosystem to confront responsibility, not just automation. But it is also necessary if autonomous systems are going to handle real value without turning every failure into an untraceable mess.
Kite’s Agent Passport does not solve the philosophical problem of trust. What it does is narrow trust down to something cryptography can enforce. You do not trust the agent’s intentions. You trust that its identity, limits, and history are real, verifiable, and bound by rules that cannot be silently bypassed.
In a world where machines transact with machines, identity is no longer a UX feature. It is infrastructure. The Agent Passport is Kite’s way of saying that before AI agents can be powerful, they must first be legible.
