what's Unicity Labs?

Unicity Labs is pioneering a blockchain protocol optimized for the autonomous agentic economy, where AI agents independently discover services, negotiate terms, and execute peer-to-peer transactions at machine speed. Departing from traditional shared-ledger blockchains that introduce bottlenecks for high-frequency agent interactions, the Unicity Protocol employs off-chain execution for scalability and privacy, anchored by on-chain cryptographic proofs. Key innovations include direct agent-to-agent communication with millisecond settlement, Trustless Sparse Merkle Trees for state aggregation, a custom BFT consensus achieving 1-second finality, and verification of asset uniqueness without processing full transaction context. Built by experts in cryptography, distributed systems, and AI—including PhDs from prior exits like Guardtime—the project operates from Zug, Switzerland, with open-source development on GitHub (unicitynetwork). It supports verifiable agent runtimes via SDKs in multiple languages and has transitioned from community mining (RandomX PoW Bitcoin fork) to a fee-burning model. Recently seed-funded by blockchain VCs, Unicity positions itself as foundational infrastructure for agentic marketplaces, enabling trustless commerce at the scale of billions of daily agent transactions.