Agents transact. The substrate has to exist first.
Agent commerce is going to scale. The primitives, rails, scopes, receipts, and dispute machinery have to be in place before that scaling, not after. TrueCom is the substrate.
Thesis.
The existing payments stack assumes a human is in the loop at authorization time. Agent-initiated payments break that assumption at the point where cryptographic proof of intent is needed most. TrueCom provides that proof: capability tokens bound to agent identity, Ed25519 signatures at every protocol surface, Merkle-chained receipts that any counterparty can verify without consulting the issuer.
The protocol is deliberately small. Six primitives. Fourteen scopes. One call shape. Every rail, every interop protocol, every future integration composes through that surface. Growth happens at the rail and interop layer, not in the primitive count.
Standards work.
We collaborate with Google A2A, Mastercard Agent Pay, Visa Intelligent Commerce, and the x402 consortium. The AP2, Visa TAP, Mastercard VI L3, x402, UCP, and ACP adapters (see /interop) are the integration surface where those collaborations show up in code.
An IETF draft-00 for empty-interval commitment is in flight. It addresses a gap in receipt chains: how to attest that nothing happened during a declared time window without storing the non-events themselves. Useful for auditors reconciling an agent's footprint without a log-everything posture.
Portfolio.
TrueCom is part of Good Ventures Lab's portfolio of agent-era products. Agent runtime is R1; hosted execution is Heroa; traffic control is RelayGate and RelayOne; agent operating system is CloudSwarm. Every product is architected to be useful on its own and to cross-communicate through named open protocols (not private coupling).
Contact.
Protocol questions: [email protected]. Partnerships and standards: use the form below.