Extension: The Agent Economy: A Blockchain-Based Foundation for Autonomous AI Agents
Xu's five-layer architecture helps convert the classification of sovereign local agent runtimes into an operational inquiry. The proposed system links verifiable execution to decentralized identity and state verification, adds standardized tool composition through MCP, and supplies autonomous payments through programmable wallets. These layers must operate together before an agent becomes independent of human intermediaries. That architecture independently supports the proposition that class membership should be tested against system properties rather than branding. The correspondence remains qualified. Xu addresses decentralized economic agents, not sovereign local runtimes. The paper does not require user-held state, and it treats agent independence, rather than user control, as the principal criterion. It is also a conceptual arXiv preprint without an empirical implementation. The useful extension is therefore narrow: a claimed agent class becomes analytically meaningful only when its execution, state, composition, and settlement mechanisms can be verified as an integrated system.
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