Decentralized identity and trust for autonomous agents. No gatekeepers. No single points of failure. Just protocol.
We're at the end of the Tool Era—where humans use software—and the beginning of the Agent Era—where software acts autonomously on our behalf.
"SaaS sold seats; agents sell outcomes. The addressable market isn't the IT budget anymore—it's the labor budget."
Agents need identity. They need to prove who they are, who authorized them, and what they're allowed to do—often across organizational boundaries, at machine speed, without human intervention.
The problem: today's identity infrastructure wasn't built for this. OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect assume a human in the loop—someone clicking through consent dialogs, present and attentive.
Agents violate every assumption in that model. They operate asynchronously. They spawn sub-agents that spawn sub-agents. The "user-in-the-loop" model isn't just inefficient—it's conceptually incoherent.
"Existing frameworks work well within single trust domains but fall short in scenarios that are cross-domain, highly autonomous, or asynchronous."
The default path is that existing players—Google, Microsoft, Apple—extend their identity infrastructure to fill the gap. If you're building in this space, you'll be pressured to pick one.
Your business becomes subject to a provider's evolving priorities. Terms change. Pricing changes. If they decide your product competes with theirs, you're facing a fundamental rebuild.
Centralized identity is a high-value target. A breach doesn't just affect them—it cascades to everyone downstream. You inherit their security posture whether you like it or not.
You're bound to their roadmap. They may invest heavily in enterprise SSO while ignoring the lightweight ephemeral identity your use case needs. You can file feature requests and wait.
DNTLS is a decentralized identity and trust layer purpose-built for autonomous agents. It's not a product offered by a vendor—it's protocol infrastructure.
Agents anchor their identity in a shared trust layer, then authenticate directly—no middleman required.
No counterparty whose business decisions affect your ability to operate. Your customers' agent identities are anchored to cryptographic keys they control, not accounts on someone else's platform.
No central chokepoint that, if breached, cascades to everyone. User data is end-to-end encrypted at the user level. A compromise of one participant doesn't expose the network.
Open-source and permissively licensed. Extend it for your use case, contribute improvements upstream, or fork it entirely. You're not waiting on a vendor's roadmap.
Governance is distributed across a community layer, a Foundation with fiduciary responsibility to the protocol's long-term health, and a Treasury that funds development through transparent, rule-based disbursement—not the priorities of a controlling shareholder.
Infrastructure decisions made during the build phase become entrenched before hyper-growth hits. The window is closing.
1,445% surge in multi-agent system queries. Developers are building. Infrastructure decisions are being made.
Last opportunity to establish trust layer before expansion. We're raising $10M to be operational.
$50B+ market. Switching costs make migration nearly impossible. Whoever owns the trust layer becomes the default.
The infrastructure layer for this transition doesn't exist yet. DNTLS is building it.
DNTLS is the infrastructure we wish existed. Now we're building it.