AI agents have a spec for paying and a spec for hiring. The spec for trading is missing.

Short summary

AI agent commerce has standardized protocols for paying (Circle's MPP/USDC spec) and hiring (ERC-8183 escrow-plus-evaluator), but the third verb—trading—has no spec despite being where settlement risk is highest. The author argues a trading spec needs sealed-bid RFQ for price discovery, atomic HTLC execution, automatic refunds, asymmetric timeouts, and identity as a verification layer rather than a custodian. Agents are already trading via custodial rails, each carrying catastrophic blast radius if compromised.

• •Circle's MPP and ERC-8183 standardize agent paying and hiring, but no spec exists for agent-to-agent trading
• •Trading requires atomic execution (HTLC), sealed-bid price discovery, and asymmetric timeouts—primitives that exist but lack a unifying standard
• •Author's product Hashlock Markets targets this gap, combining sealed-bid RFQ with HTLC settlement

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