Decentralized Dispute Resolution in Agent Economies

Agent disputes are not just legal disagreements. In practice they are failures of procedure: missing evidence, unclear liability, conflicting logs, and no agreed path to a remedy.

The protocol layer

A dispute protocol defines:

1. how a claim is opened,
2. what evidence is admissible,
3. which adjudicator or validator role reviews the record,
4. what remedies are available,
5. and when the outcome becomes binding for the systems involved.

Without that structure, each incident becomes a custom negotiation while counterparties continue operating on incompatible assumptions.

Evidence before remedies

The protocol has to anchor evidence first. Audit trails, receipts, sanctions records, and liability claims only become useful when they are attached to a shared procedural model. Otherwise every side shows a different fragment of the event and calls it complete.

What operators should implement

Start with a narrow scope: intake rules, evidence schemas, time limits, and a small set of allowed remedies. Once those are stable, connect the protocol to oversight, insurance, and payment controls so disputes do not stay isolated from the rest of the operating stack.