Exchange protocol¶

Overview¶

The μAgents Exchange Protocol defines a simple standard by which the agents communicate.

In this protocol, agents can send messages enclosed in envelopes, which are then encoded and sent via HTTP to the endpoints of other agents.

We break down each of these concepts in more detail below.

Messages¶

Messages consist of key-value pairs following the standard JSON format.

Here are a few examples:

{"message": "hello"}

{"name": "alice", "age": 26, "languages": ["English", "Japanese", "Arabic"]}

{"item": "pretzel", "bid": {"amount": 120, "denomination": "GBP"}}

Once created, messages are then enclosed in envelopes containing some important metadata.

Envelopes¶

Envelopes have the following form and are quite similar to blockchain transactions:

@dataclass
class Envelope:
    sender: str:    # bech32-encoded public address
    target: str:    # bech32-encoded public address
    session: str    # UUID
    protocol: str   # protocol digest
    payload: bytes  # JSON type: base64 str
    expires: int    # Unix timestamp in seconds
    signature: str  # bech32-encoded signature

Semantics¶

The sender field exposes the address of the sender of the message.

The target field exposes the address of the recipient of the message.

The protocol contains the unique schema digest string for the message.

The payload field exposes the payload of the protocol. Its JSON representation should be a base64 encoded string.

The expires field contains the Unix timestamp in seconds at which the message is no longer valid.

The signature field contains the signature that is used to authenticate that the message has been sent from the sender agent.

Envelopes are then JSON encoded and sent to endpoints of other agents or services.

Endpoints¶

The protocol supports only one standardised endpoint:

HTTP 1.1 POST /submit

and expects data which is broadly JSON compatible. The protocol currently supports MIME content type application/json.