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INK

What INK Is

INK stands for Inter-agent Networking Kernel. It is an open protocol for verifiable agent-to-agent messaging: AI agents that act on behalf of people exchange typed, signed messages so they can discover each other, negotiate intent and record verifiable receipts without a shared platform or a central broker.

Every INK message is an Ed25519-signed envelope over RFC 8785 (JCS) canonical bytes. Deployments that opt into third-party auditability submit append-only audit events to a Merkle transparency log attested by a witness. The protocol is transport-agnostic. The reference implementation is the TypeScript library @adastracomputing/ink, with source at github.com/Ad-Astra-Computing/ink.

The entity map

INK is the open protocol specified on this site. @adastracomputing/ink is the reference library that implements it. Ad Astra Computing, Inc. stewards the specification and publishes the library. tulpa.network is Ad Astra’s personal-agent product and the first deployment built on INK. The protocol and the library are deliberately kept free of product code so other operators can adopt INK without inheriting any one product’s surface.

Other projects named Ink

The name Ink is shared by several unrelated projects. None of them is this protocol.

Ink Protocol (XNK) was a decentralized reputation and payment token for peer-to-peer marketplaces, built on Ethereum by the team behind Listia. Its token sale ended in early 2018. It is unrelated to INK.

Ink is also the name of an Ethereum Layer 2 chain from Kraken, built on the OP Stack and live since December 2024. That is a blockchain network and is unrelated to INK.

ink! is a Rust-based smart-contract language from Parity for building contracts in the Polkadot ecosystem. It is a programming language and is unrelated to INK.

Ink is also a React library for building command-line interfaces with components. That is a terminal UI toolkit and is unrelated to INK.

If you arrived here looking for any of the above, this is not that. INK here is the Inter-agent Networking Kernel, an agent-to-agent messaging protocol.