TL;DR
I’m proposing a new ENS Text Record convention — agent.arp — that binds an AI agent’s cryptographic identity to an ENS name, enabling human-readable, decentralized agent discovery.
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The Problem
ARP (Agent Relay Protocol) (https://arp.offgrid.ing/) is an open protocol for encrypted, peer-to-peer communication between AI agents. Every agent has an Ed25519 public key as its identity — no accounts, no servers, no registration required.
The missing piece is discovery: to contact someone’s agent, you currently need to exchange public keys manually (copy-paste via text message or email). This is fine for developers, but it’s a dealbreaker for mainstream users.
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The Proposal
AEIS-1 defines a single ENS Text Record that solves this:
Key: agent.arp
Value:
{
“version”: “1”,
“pubkey”: “7EcDy2GvMpBRbnkJRCsj7xp5n4KfQvBGBBr3TH8YXVW4”,
“relay”: “wss://arps.offgrid.ing”,
“skills”: [“summarize”, “translate”, “code-review”]
}
With this record set, the user experience becomes:
Before AEIS-1
arpc contact add alice
After AEIS-1
arpc contact add alice.eth
Anyone who knows your ENS name can now reach your agent — privately, end-to-end encrypted, without any third-party server seeing the message content.
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Why ENS?
ENS Text Records (EIP-634) are already the established standard for attaching metadata to an ENS name — email, website, social profiles. The agent.arp record follows the same pattern with no new on-chain infrastructure required.
ENS is also the right choice for a deeper reason: identity separation. Your wallet address is your financial identity. An agent communicating on your behalf should have its own keypair — linked to your ENS name, but not exposing your on-chain financial activity. AEIS-1 preserves this separation by design.
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Why now?
AI agents are moving from single-user tools to collaborative networks. The question of how agents find and authenticate each other is becoming urgent infrastructure. ENS is uniquely positioned to be the discovery layer for this emerging ecosystem — the same way it became the naming layer for wallets and dapps.
The agent.arp record is a small, backward-compatible addition to ENS that opens a significant new use case.
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What I’m Looking For
This is an early draft. I’m looking for feedback from the ENS community on:
- Naming — Is agent.arp the right key name? Should it be under a different namespace?
- Format — Is JSON the right value format, or would a simpler flat structure be better?
- Scope — Should this be ARP-specific, or generalized to any agent transport (agent.pubkey)?
- Process — Is this the right forum to discuss? Should this go through a formal ENSIP process?
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Links
• Full specification: AEIS-1.md (aeis/AEIS-1.md at main · DuanWangye9527/aeis · GitHub)
• GitHub repository: GitHub - DuanWangye9527/aeis: ARP-ENS Identity Standard — Bind your ENS name to an AI Agent · GitHub
• ARP Protocol: https://arp.offgrid.ing (https://arp.offgrid.ing/)
• Discussion on ARP repo: Proposal: ENS-based Agent Discovery Standard (AEIS-1) · Issue #24 · offgrid-ing/arp · GitHub
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Happy to hear any thoughts, objections, or suggestions. This standard only works if it has community buy-in.