Autonomous Economic Agents as a Second Layer Technology for Blockchains: Framework Introduction and Use-Case Demonstration

The user experience of interacting with distributed ledger technologies (DLT) is fraught with excessive complexity, high risk and unintuitive processes. Moreover, smart contracts deployed in these systems are restricted to being reactive. These limitations have negative implications on user adoption and prevent DLTs from being general purpose. We introduce a framework for the development of Autonomous Economic Agents (AEAs), software agents that act autonomously and pursue an economic goal, and demonstrate how AEAs complement existing decentralised ledgers as a second layer technology. In particular, the framework enables a simplified user experience through automation, supports modularisation and reuse of complex decision making and machine learning capabilities, and allows for proactive behaviour facilitating autonomy. We demonstrate these gains in the context of a specific use-case, a multi-agent trading system modelling a Walrasian Exchange Economy populated by a number of agents trading a basket of tokens.