DAO-Agent: Zero Knowledge-Verified Incentives for Decentralized Multi-Agent Coordination

TL;DR

DAO-Agent introduces a privacy-preserving, cost-efficient decentralized framework for multi-agent coordination using zero-knowledge proofs and off-chain contribution measurement, ensuring transparency and fairness in trustless environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid architecture combining on-chain DAO governance with off-chain ZKP-based contribution measurement for scalable, private, and auditable multi-agent coordination.

Findings

Achieves up to 99.9% reduction in verification gas costs.

Maintains constant verification time regardless of coalition size.

Demonstrates effective coordination in a crypto trading case study.

Abstract

Autonomous Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have emerged as a promising paradigm for facilitating cross-application and cross-organization collaborations. These autonomous agents often operate in trustless environments, where centralized coordination faces significant challenges, such as the inability to ensure transparent contribution measurement and equitable incentive distribution. While blockchain is frequently proposed as a decentralized coordination platform, it inherently introduces high on-chain computation costs and risks exposing sensitive execution information of the agents. Consequently, the core challenge lies in enabling auditable task execution and fair incentive distribution for autonomous LLM agents in trustless environments, while simultaneously preserving their strategic privacy and minimizing on-chain costs. To address this challenge, we propose DAO-Agent, a novel framework that integrates three key technical innovations: (1) an on-chain decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance mechanism for transparent coordination and immutable logging; (2) a ZKP mechanism approach that enables Shapley-based contribution measurement off-chain, and (3) a hybrid on-chain/off-chain architecture that verifies ZKP-validated contribution measurements on-chain with minimal computational overhead. We implement DAO-Agent and conduct end-to-end experiments using a crypto trading task as a case study. Experimental results demonstrate that DAO-Agent achieves up to 99.9% reduction in verification gas costs compared to naive on-chain alternatives, with constant-time verification complexity that remains stable as coalition size increases, thereby establishing a scalable foundation for agent coordination in decentralized environments.