Agentic Web: Collaborative AI Agents for Decentralized Economies and Autonomous Systems

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid evolution of autonomous AI agents is transforming digital ecosystems, yet most research remains focused on individual agent capabilities, including reasoning, planning, tool use, and memory. A critical dimension remains underexplored: how can agents collaborate, compete, and form viable economic organizations when trust is neither given nor guaranteed? As millions of agents operate across decentralized platforms, the need for verifiable cooperation, conflict resolution, economic coordination, and shared security becomes urgent. This Special Issue shifts the spotlight from solitary intelligence to collaborative, economically rational AI agents, grounded in blockchain-empowered mechanisms.

We introduce a new research horizon, Agentic Web, where agents interact not through blind faith or centralized oracles, but through transparent, cryptographically enforced protocols, smart contract commitments, and incentive-compatible designs. This framework bridges computer science with organizational management and financial economics, offering a unified lens for designing decentralized markets, autonomous enterprises, and resilient digital infrastructures. This paradigm draws from Prof. Qiang Qu’s work on Blockchain+AI convergence and his vision of an intelligent society built on distributed trust and collaborative infrastructure.

Key emerging directions include, but are not limited to:

• On-chain agents: AI agents with logic, governance, and transactions immutably recorded and executable on blockchains.
• Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocols: Standardized messaging, value exchange, self-evolving and negotiation frameworks for autonomous agent collaboration.
• Autonomous payments and micro-economies: Self-executing financial arrangements where agents earn, spend, stake, and settle without human intervention.
• AI agents in financial trading: Decentralized trading strategies, collective arbitrage, risk-aware agent swarms, and LLM-driven market making.
• Trust management for multi-agent systems: Reputation, slashing, dispute resolution, and incentive compatibility embedded in smart contracts.
• Emergent collaboration and agent swarms: Decentralized coordination, task allocation, and consensus formation without central planners.
• Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in distributed environments: Policy updates, cooperative exploration, and adversarial robustness in trustless and distributed environments.
• Verifiable credentials and decentralized identity for agents: Self-sovereign agent identities, attestations, and sybil resistance.
• Agent-based DAO governance: AI agents as voters, proposers, or delegates in decentralized autonomous organizations.
• Human–agent–AI collaboration: Verifiable workflows where humans and autonomous agents jointly execute missions under cryptoeconomic incentives.
• Agentic Web3/Web4 infrastructure: Agent-friendly smart contract architectures, gas optimization for agent loops, and off-chain computation with on-chain verification.
• Cross-chain agent communication: Agents operating across heterogeneous blockchains with unified trust assumptions.
• Safety, alignment, and adversarial resilience: Preventing rogue agents, collusion attacks, and incentive gaming in open agent economies.
• Algorithmic governance and organizational design: Smart-contract-encoded rules, voting mechanisms, and adaptive constitutions for agent-based enterprises, supply chains, and DAOs.
• Cryptoeconomic incentives and market design: Tokenomics, bonding curves, auction mechanisms, and dynamic pricing for agent-driven labor markets, data exchanges, and financial clearinghouses.

This Special Issue invites original research articles, comprehensive reviews, and short communications that bridge multi-agent systems, blockchain, distributed trust, and economic game theory with explicit openness to contributions from computer science, management science, computational finance, and organizational theory. We seek contributions that move beyond proof-of-concept toward robust, scalable, and verifiable collaborative agent systems. Both theoretical frameworks (e.g., incentive-compatible collaboration, formal verification of agent protocols, mechanism design) and applied studies (e.g., agent-based DeFi, autonomous marketplaces, decentralized energy grids, algorithmic HR and procurement) are strongly encouraged.

By contributing to this Special Issue, you will help define the emerging science of agent-driven economic coordination, a cornerstone for the next-generation decentralized and autonomous economic systems. We look forward to receiving your bold, rigorous, and impactful work.

Prof. Dr. Qiang Qu
Dr. Md Monjurul Karim
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• agentic web
• trusted web services
• collaborative AI agents
• trustworthy multi-agent systems
• blockchain for agent coordination
• agent-to-agent (A2A) protocols
• autonomous payments
• on-chain intelligence
• decentralized AI governance
• smart contract agents
• agent-based DeFi and trading
• verifiable collaboration
• multi-agent reinforcement learning
• agent swarms
• decentralized identity for agents
• cryptoeconomics
• algorithmic governance
• decentralized markets and organizational design