In Brief
Give agents names that describe what they can do, not where they run: you can discover capable agents across organizations, keep references stable through migrations, and cryptographically verify claims.
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Key Findings
A simple agent:// naming scheme separates an agent’s identity from its location and encodes what the agent can do as a readable path. Distributed hash table lookup keyed by organization plus capability path lets requesters find agents quickly and without a central registry. Organizations sign capability claims with verifiable tokens so consumers can check that an agent really offers the advertised capability. The design scales in practice, covers real-world tool names, and resolves names in microseconds. Semantic Capability Matching Pattern
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Data Highlights
1100% coverage when mapping 369 production tools from five agent frameworks to capability paths with zero namespace collision
2Perfect discovery precision and recall (F1 = 1.0) across a 10,000-agent testbed; typical query returns averaged 128 agents for broad queries and 39 for targeted queries
3URI parsing, canonicalization, and prefix matching complete in under 5 microseconds; discovery completes in O(log N) hops on the distributed hash table
Implications
Platform engineers and architects building multi-agent systems will use this to keep agent references stable across cloud or host migrations and to discover agents by capability rather than location. Security and integration teams gain a straightforward way to cryptographically verify capability claims across organizational boundaries before allowing interactions. Capability Attestation Pattern
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Learn MoreYes, But...
The model depends on organizations acting as trust roots and publishing verification keys; if a trust root is malicious or compromised, attestations can be abused. Distributed hash table visibility and privacy properties need operational care—public DHT entries reveal offered capabilities unless you add access controls. The scheme focuses on naming and discovery, not full governance: policy, auditing, and permissioning still require additional infrastructure. Guardrails Pattern
Methodology & More
The agent:// scheme gives each agent a stable, topology-independent name that includes an organization (trust root), a capability path describing what the agent can do, and a unique identifier. Capabilities are expressed as hierarchical paths (for example workflow/approval/invoice), which make it easy to query by a specific function or by a broader category. Registrations live in a distributed hash table keyed by the concatenation of trust root and capability path; prefix keys support subtree queries. Organizations issue cryptographic attestation tokens (Paseto) that bind an agent’s identifier to claimed capabilities; consumers fetch the trust root’s public keys from a well-known location to verify tokens. Capability Attestation Pattern Semantic Capability Matching Pattern
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Credibility Assessment:
Single author with no affiliation or reputation signals; minimal credibility.