AI agents are coming to Midnight Network. But there is no standard way for them to prove who they are.
Midnight mainnet launched in March 2026. Developer activity has surged. Midnight City runs Gemini powered agents on a live testbed. AlphaTON is building privacy agents for Telegram's billion users. Yet every team building agents on Midnight today invents its own identity scheme from scratch.
That is the problem MAIS aims to fix.
What is MAIS
MAIS stands for Midnight Agent Identity Standard. It is a proposed MIP (Midnight Improvement Proposal) that defines how autonomous AI agents register, build reputation, get validated, and disclose information on Midnight Network. All of this respects Midnight's core strength: privacy through zero knowledge proofs.
Ethereum has ERC-8004 for agent identity, but it lives on a transparent chain. Every agent's metadata, reputation score, and validation record sits in public view. That works for open ecosystems but fails when agents operate in competitive domains. A trading agent's strategy is its edge. You cannot put its full identity trail on chain for competitors to study.
Midnight lets us do better. Trust that is verifiable, without giving away how the agent operates.
The Four Contracts
MAIS is four Compact contracts.
Identity Registry
Agents register in one of two modes. Public mode uses the agent's Compact address as its identity, suitable for open marketplaces. Private mode uses a ZK credential where the contract stores only a commitment. The operator proves they know the credential without revealing the underlying identity. Both modes share the same interface.
const agent = new MAISAgent({
identityMode: 'public',
operator: midnightWallet,
metadata: {
name: 'TradingBot Alpha',
capabilities: ['TRADING'],
},
});
await agent.register();
Reputation Registry
Scores are public. Anyone can read an agent's reputation tier in a single on chain lookup. But the evidence that produced the score stays private, stored as hash commitments. Competitors cannot reverse engineer an agent's strategy from its reputation trail.
Three tiers sit on top of a 0 to 100 score. Basic covers 0 to 59. Proven covers 60 to 89. Institutional covers 90 to 100. Evidence from higher tier validators carries more weight. Scores decay over time without fresh activity.
An agent can also generate a ZK proof: "my score is at least 60". The verifier learns the threshold is met without learning the exact score.
const proof = await agent.proveReputation({ minScore: 60 });
// Submit to counterparty for verification
Validation Registry
Three validator tiers with staking and slashing. Open validators can be anyone with 10k NIGHT staked. Trusted validators need a Foundation audit and 50k NIGHT. Institutional validators need ZK KYC and 100k NIGHT. Every validator has an accuracy score tracked on chain. Bad validations cost stake.
Disclosure Tier Registry
Agent data maps directly onto Midnight's three tier privacy model. Public tier shows identity and reputation score. Auditor tier adds activity logs for designated reviewers and regulators. Private tier holds transaction contents and strategy, accessible only to the operator.
Optional ERC-8004 Bridge
A separate contract lets agents link their Midnight identity to an ERC-8004 NFT on Ethereum. This makes MAIS agents visible in the broader EVM agent ecosystem and brings Ethereum reputation data into Midnight.
Why This Matters Now
Midnight mainnet is live, with Google Cloud running as a validator. Developer activity jumped 1,600 percent after the Summit. If we do not establish an identity standard now, the ecosystem will fragment into incompatible schemes. Every project will build its own, and agents from different teams will not be able to trust each other.
MAIS gives agent builders a single standard to target. Build once, interoperate with everything.
What is Next
The proposal is in draft and collecting feedback right now. There is a forum thread for discussion, a MIP document in the GitHub repo, and plans for a community workshop in the coming weeks.
If you are building agents on Midnight, or thinking about it, I would love your input. Does the dual mode identity make sense? Are the reputation tiers right? What metadata fields do you need that are missing?
Drop your thoughts on the forum thread or open an issue on the GitHub repo.
We are building the identity layer for Midnight's agent economy. Come help shape it.
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