Machine Identity in the Agent Economy

Software agents are getting identities — A2A Agent Cards, signed credentials, DIDs. Physical equipment is the missing asset class. A machine without a verifiable identity can't be discovered, trusted, metered, or financed by an autonomous system. This is an honest map of the protocols, standards, and implementations working on giving real-world machines a digital identity they (and the agents around them) can rely on — not a ranking, a curation.

Why machine identity matters now

Every machine today is identified by something brittle: an OEM serial that changes when a controller is swapped, an asset tag trapped in one MES, an IP address that gets reassigned. None of it is portable or verifiable. As AI agents start to perceive, transact with, and coordinate physical equipment, they need a stable name for a machine that survives operator changes and that another party can verify. Humans solved this with KYC; software agents with KYA. The machine version — call it KYM, Know Your Machine — is what the projects below are building, each from a different angle.

The standards layer — W3C DIDs

Underneath most serious efforts sits the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DID) standard: a vendor-neutral way to express an identity that no single platform owns, resolvable to a document describing how to authenticate it. DIDs don't, by themselves, solve machine identity — but they're the common substrate several of the implementations below build on, and the reason a machine identity doesn't have to be locked to one vendor's cloud.

Implementations giving machines an identity

peaq — peaq ID for the machine economy

peaq is a layer-1 network purpose-built for DePIN and the machine economy. Its peaq ID gives vehicles, robots, sensors, and machines a self-sovereign, DID-based identity they control, paired with peaq access (role-based permissions) and peaq pay (machine-to-machine payments). If you're thinking about identity as the root of a broader machine-economy stack — identity, then access, then payment — peaq is the most complete expression of that thesis.

IoTeX — ioID for connected devices

IoTeX is a blockchain network for DePIN and connected devices. Its ioID standard issues decentralized identities to machines and devices, binding a real device to an on-chain identity, while W3bstream generates verifiable proofs from device data. IoTeX's center of gravity is consumer and prosumer DePIN hardware, but the ioID primitive is general: a way to give any device a cryptographic identity and bind its data to it.

FoundryNet / MINT — identity for industrial machines

FoundryNet mints a persistent identity for industrial equipment through its MINT layer, focused on the plant floor: CNCs, robots, and cobots across 16 OEM families. The identity is designed to survive operator changes and controller swaps, the edge runtime holds no wallet keys (so an extracted credential is a scoped, revocable key), and the identity is exposed through MCP tools and a machine-readable Agent Card. Where peaq and IoTeX start from a network, FoundryNet starts from the messy reality of industrial telemetry and works up to identity plus attested work.

OpenMind / FABRIC — identity and coordination for robots

OpenMind builds OM1, an open operating system for robots, and FABRIC, a protocol aimed at machine-to- machine identity, trust, and coordination — letting robots from different makers verify one another and collaborate. It's the most robotics-native entry here: identity in service of autonomous machines working together, rather than of metering or finance.

How to think about picking one

These aren't substitutes so much as different starting points. If you're building a DePIN network of devices, peaq or IoTeX give you identity as a network primitive. If you're putting AI agents onto a mixed-OEM industrial fleet and care about identity plus verifiable work, FoundryNet/MINT meets you at the telemetry. If your world is multi-robot coordination, OpenMind's FABRIC is built for it. All of them point at the same future: machines as first-class, addressable participants in an economy run partly by agents.

Want your machine-identity project listed here? It belongs on this page if it gives physical equipment a verifiable identity — tell us about it. See also: Work Attestation for IoT & Industrial Equipment →