On April 20, Ant Digital Tech introduced the "4R Full-Stack" architecture concept for the agent economy at the Hong Kong Web3 Festival, encompassing four layers: Agentic Runtime, Payment Rails, Agent Registry, and Root Infrastructure. This framework aims to provide AI agents with a technical infrastructure covering identity, payment, risk control, and compliance.
Ant Digital Tech CTO Yan Ying pointed out in her speech that the current foundation of the agent economy suffers from "four gaps": execution failures due to prompt logic vulnerabilities, responsibility vacuums caused by AI's lack of credible identity, transaction barriers from payment gateways designed for humans, and collaboration risks arising from a lack of trust between unfamiliar agents. "These cannot be resolved by simply patching software; they require a redesign from the underlying infrastructure level," she said.
According to Yan Ying, the core product of the Agentic Runtime layer is DTClaw, which incorporates the CARLI security model to enforce constraints on agent behavior at the execution level. It supports multi-model compatibility and financial-grade compliance standards, aiming to make every AI operation controllable, auditable, and recoverable.
The Payment Rails layer builds native on-chain payment channels, integrating agent intelligent decision-making with verifiable credential chain technology. This ensures precise payment intent recognition and full-link security control while achieving transparency and immutability in the transaction process. For high-frequency micro-transaction scenarios, the platform constructs a native instant settlement network that supports cross-chain, multi-asset seamless flow, and intelligent routing, significantly improving capital turnover efficiency. Additionally, by providing a standardized development toolchain and a seamless wallet integration experience, the solution greatly reduces development barriers and user costs, forming a payment closed-loop that balances financial-grade security and an optimal user experience.
The Agent Registry layer issues on-chain identities for each agent based on DID (Decentralized Identity) and the ERC-8004 standard, ensuring that every collaboration between agents is documented. The Root Infrastructure layer serves as the architectural foundation, utilizing Jovay Layer2 to achieve 120-millisecond confirmation times to support AI micro-payments, and combining ZKVM technology to enable off-chain computation and on-chain verification, addressing the trust issues in AI economy computing power. Yan Ying stated, "The Root Infrastructure uses blockchain and privacy computing technologies to provide agents with an immutable contract execution environment. Even two unfamiliar AIs can establish trust based on code and conduct transactions with confidence."
Currently, AI is evolving from the era of Chat and Action to the era of the agent economy. Yan Ying believes that the qualitative change in the third stage lies not in AI becoming smarter, but in it beginning to possess assets and transaction rights. She noted that over the past decade, Ant Digital Tech has accumulated extensive engineering practices in financial-grade security, privacy computing, blockchain, and compliance systems, and the 4R architecture is built upon this foundation with全新研发和设计 (entirely new research and design).
