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Coral Protocol by Ai23T: The Connective Tissue of the Emerging AI Agent Society

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The dawn of the internet of agents

Imagine a world where intelligent digital workers—AI agents—handle countless tasks across our digital landscape. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the near future we’re rapidly approaching. Today, we’re witnessing the birth of specialized AI agents that can write code, analyze data, generate content, and perform countless other tasks with remarkable capability.

But there’s a fundamental problem.

These powerful agents exist in isolation. Like brilliant specialists who speak different languages and work in separate buildings with no phones or email, they can’t effectively collaborate. A financial analysis agent can’t easily work with a legal review agent, which can’t coordinate with a coding agent—not without significant human intervention.

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Coral Protocol: Creating Connections

Just as coral reefs create the physical structure that supports some of Earth’s most diverse ecosystems, the Coral Protocol aims to provide critical infrastructure for agent collaboration in our emerging digital ocean.

Coral is not attempting to be the entire ocean—that would be impossible and undesirable. Instead, it seeks to be one of the foundational reef systems that enables richness, diversity, and collaboration to flourish.

The protocol focuses on solving four fundamental challenges that currently prevent agents from working together effectively:

• Discovery: How do agents find each other and verify compatibility?
• Composition: How do agents communicate and pay across different frameworks.
• Scalability: How do we ensure the availability of agents and how they can leverage each other in the most efficient way?
• Safety: How do we ensure that these systems are built in a way that is safe for everyone using them, along the lines of decentralization, security, and evaluation?

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Why This Matters

The difference between isolated agents and collaborative ones is the difference between having access to individual experts versus coordinated teams of specialists. When intelligent agents can seamlessly work together:

• More intelligent: Agents can divide and conquer on larger tasks as the network grows - without limit
• More autonomy: Larger graphs of agents will have more connections to the real world
• More adaptive: Networks of specialized agents can rapidly reconfigure to address new challenges, redistributing workloads and evolving their collaborative patterns based on changing conditions
• Safer: centralized or hierarchical agents create single points of failure, compromising safety.

Consider how the internet became transformative not because of individual websites, but because of protocols that allowed these sites to connect, link, and interact. Similarly, the true potential of artificial intelligence will be realized not through individual agents—no matter how powerful—but through their ability to collaborate.

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Part of a Larger Ecosystem

The Coral Protocol doesn’t aim to be the only solution in this space. Just as our oceans contain diverse reef systems, each supporting unique ecosystems while remaining interconnected, we envision a future with multiple complementary protocols and standards.

Coral’s focus on secure, private agent communication with an initial emphasis on marketing & financial applications represents one essential reef system in what will become a vast and varied agentic ocean. Other protocols will likely emerge with different specializations and approaches, and the most vibrant future will include many such systems working in harmony.

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The path to AGI

If this is the path toward creating highly capable, large-scale agentic systems like AGI, it is absolutely critical that they are designed with safety as a foundational principle. We firmly believe that AGI should not emerge as the product of a single company or a lone agent—even if powered by decentralized resources. Instead, its development should be a collaborative effort led by the global community, ensuring that its benefits are shared by all.