Equilibrium Infra Bulletin #37: TEE x AI Agents, Speeding Up Narwhal, Multi-prover zkVM, and more...
Equilibrium designs, builds, and invests in core infrastructure for the decentralized web. We are a global team of ~30 people tackling challenges around security, privacy, and scaling.
🔍 Setting Your Pet Rock Free
⚡️ Topic Summary
AI agents have been a hot topic recently, with the trend being largely kicked off by Truth Terminal. However, a fundamental flaw of previous AI agents is that they cannot prove their autonomy. How can observers verify that there isn’t a human operator intervening and making decisions behind the scenes?
In response to this criticism, Flashbots and Nous Research collaborated to create tee_hee_he - a truly free, fully autonomous AI agent living on X. The criteria they consider for true autonomy:
Exclusive Control: The AI must have sole access to its accounts and operational resources.
Verifiable Independence: Third parties must be able to verify that no human can intervene in the AI’s operations.
Irrevocable Delegation: Once control is transferred to the AI, it must be technically impossible for humans to regain control.
To make it physically impossible for developers to access or modify the AI after deployment, they leverage trusted execution environments (TEE). The root credentials to the Twitter account and the private key to the Ethereum address are delegated to a TEE, which provides both confidentiality and attestation. Given that this is a test, the account credentials will be printed to the debug log seven days after launch, allowing human admins to step in and recover control of the account.
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🤔 Our Thoughts
As the authors highlight in the post, the standard for truth and verification has been very weak in the AI field. Relying on attestation rather than trust allows for setting a new standard for agents’ provable autonomy. For a more technical overview of the implementation, see this post.
Another interesting point is that this whole issue is almost a twist on the deepfake prevention tech (such as watermarking LLMs or human creators signing their work). Rather than trying to prevent using AI to create a deepfake of a human, the issue here is trying to prevent a human from deepfaking an AI (and reaping benefits, e.g. from launching meme coins).
As observed from this experiment, fully autonomous agents get restricted quickly on Twitter due to suspected bot behavior. Given there is no human control, the team behind it can’t intervene to reactivate it manually, and the agent should be able to do all the human checks designed to be anti-bot. A hard ask!
tee_hee_he quickly got restricted on Twitter due to suspected bot behavior
💡 Research, Articles & Other Things of Interest
🤓 Rorqual: Speeding up Narwhal with TEEs: Rorqual is a protocol designed to enhance the performance of the Narwhal Mempool by integrating Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
🤓 Practical Rateless Set Reconciliation: Introducing Rateless Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables (RIBLT), which lowers computation and communication costs to enable faster state synchronization. Compared to the current Ethereum implementation, authors demonstrate that RIBLT could lower end-to-end completion time by 5.6x and communication cost by 4.4x.
📚 powdrVM: A Multi-Prover, Future-Proof zkVM: Currently supports Plonky3, Halo2, Polygon PIL STARK, and Eigen Labs’ Starky, with more to come.
📚 Transacting Over Heterogeneous Trust with Intent Markets: How Khalani contributes to building a seamless, unified blockchain ecosystem that spans heterogeneous trust domains.
📚 2024 Crypto Startup Trends Report: Alliance’s latest report has several interesting data points, e.g. ~2/3 of all startups still choose to build in the Ethereum ecosystem.
📚 Unveiling the Confidential ERC-20 Framework: Joint research by Circle and Inco Network on achieving compliant privacy on public blockchains using FHE.
🤌 Personal Recommendations From Our Team
📚 Reading: Ready Player One - Ernest Cline: Follow along as the teenager Wade Watts searches for an easter egg in the game OASIS which, if found, would give access to both the creator’s wealth and the game itself.
🎧 Listening: Lin Van Hek - Intimacy: A classic from the Australian singer that featured as the soundtrack for the first Terminator movie.
💡 Other: A recent study suggests that dark matter does not exist and the universe is 27 billion years old.