Moca Chain goes live as AI agents need a way to prove who they are

AI agents are no longer just answering questions. They’re shopping, booking trips, signing up for services, and increasingly acting on their users’ behalf. However, when an agent shows up at a website or app, how does the business know who it’s working for, and what it’s actually allowed to do? Moca Network, the digital identity project from Animoca Brands, thinks it has part of the answer. Together with the Moca Foundation, it launched the mainnet of Moca Chain , a blockchain built specifically for digital identity.

Say you’ve told a shopping agent to find and book a flight under $400. That shouldn’t give it free rein over your personal data, your saved cards, or the ability to buy whatever else it likes. Proving an agent is legitimate is no easy task. It also means simultaneously building a chain of trust that links the user, the agent, and the businesses it deals with. That chain has to travel with the agent wherever it goes.

Moca Chain is designed around identity from the start. Instead of bolting identity features onto a general-purpose chain, it lets organizations verify a user’s data and issue tamper-proof credentials on-chain. Those organizations include banks and financial platforms, telcos, retailers, and ticketing services. Users hold those credentials themselves and decide where to share them.

When an app needs to check something, like whether you’ve passed KYC or hold a certain membership, it gets a digitally certified confirmation rather than a copy of your documents. And if a credential is updated or revoked, that change is reflected across the whole network, so every connected app sees it without you having to re-submit anything.

Alongside the launch, Moca Network is putting its full focus on AIR , its integration layer for identity, payments, and loyalty. AIR is built on Moca Chain and continues to add enterprise, infrastructure, and data partners. It gives businesses a single integration point for onboarding users and their AI agents.

It works in both directions. A company can turn the customer checks it already runs into credentials on Moca Chain. Or it can accept credentials issued by trusted partners to speed up sign-ups and unlock access based on verified data. The upshot is that businesses can share what they know about a customer without having to store as much personal information themselves.

AIR also extends this to AI agents by letting users set an agent’s permissions and authorization rules. Before offering an agent access, pricing, services, or deals, a business can verify both the agent and its human owner. It can also confirm the scope of what the agent has been cleared to do. In practice, an agent could prove it’s authorized to make a certain kind of purchase without the user having to expose the personal details behind that authorization again and again.

That matters, because the future of agentic commerce won’t hinge only on whether AI can do the task. Businesses also have to trust the agent enough to let it.

All of this changes what digital identity has to do. For people, identity checks have mostly answered “Are you who you say you are? Are you old enough? Have you passed the required verification?” Agents then add another question, which is delegation. An agent can be perfectly genuine and still not have permission to do a particular thing. So identity has to convey not just who’s behind the agent but what that person has signed off on.

Moca Network CEO Kenneth Shek says that while AI agents need scalable data sharing to act for people, “the trust framework for delegation and authority is lacking,” and that platforms have often traded away user privacy to make agent automation work. AIR’s answer is scoped, user-defined permissions instead of blanket access to someone’s data or accounts.

That could make authorization much more fine-grained. You might let an agent book hotels but only within a set budget, deal only with certain services, or use specific verified attributes without revealing the data underneath. And when you no longer need it to have those permissions, you can take them back.

Moca launches mainnet with partners already on board across consumer platforms, fintech, loyalty programs, and agentic commerce. They include SK Planet, Biletinial, Oyunfor, Open Campus, OneFootball, Automobili Lamborghini, Inveo Kripto, Plume, and Nansen.

Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, argues the current model doesn’t just waste users’ time. It also keeps them locked into platforms where they’re already verified. That makes it harder for competing merchants and providers to win them over.

If agents become the main way people interact with online services, identity and authorization will need to work like core internet infrastructure: portable across apps, checkable by different organizations, protective of privacy, and easy to update or revoke. Decades have been spent building ways to prove that a human can access an account. What’s needed now is a way to prove that a piece of software is acting for the right person, with the right permissions, at the right moment. Beyond just making agents capable, getting the rest of the internet to trust them requires new innovation.

Contributed article. Not produced by the TNW newsroom and does not reflect the editorial stance of TNW.