Trust, Discovery & Autonomy in the Age of Agentic AI

About this session

E.G. Galano argued that agents trying to discover and pay for MCP APIs were running into a problem web2 had already solved twice: search and curated marketplaces settled who to trust for content and goods, and reputable couriers settled delivery without anyone needing to trust the brand on the van. His claim was that Infura's RPC-scoring experience, roughly a decade of it by his own account, carried over directly to scoring agents and services, and that this unglamorous work was what stood between agents and reliable transacting.

He traced Infura's path from a centralized RPC provider, once flagged as a single point of failure that reputable providers such as Alchemy helped mitigate, toward a decentralized marketplace protocol he called DIN, the Decentralized Infrastructure Network. DIN routed requests to independent infrastructure operators, and a watchtower-style network continuously checked each one for latency, regional hosting, and data consistency. Once his team pointed that same scoring approach at MCP APIs, Galano said it extended easily, since a custom check could cover any service trait a consumer cared about.

Payment ran through x402, letting a caller pay per request in crypto rather than managing separate accounts across every RPC or API provider. Staking ran through an EigenLayer AVS using restaked ETH, comparable to Lido's staked ETH by his description, so operators secured the network without Infura issuing its own token. On top of that sat an onchain SLA, a bond guaranteeing a provider's price and availability for a set window.

Galano linked this to ERC-8004, the onchain agent registry effort, saying DIN's service registry and an agent registry were converging on the same underlying problem: how reputation gets attested onchain. In the Q&A, an attendee noted that crypto wallets, unlike credit cards, don't expire but can run dry. Galano agreed x402's per-request design handled subscription-style usage poorly, and floated unresolved ideas such as time-bound access tokens or a stake-and-slash model in place of prepayment.