--- type: Agentic Web Standard title: "VCAP: Verified Commerce for Agent Protocols" description: "How can two autonomous agent-run marketplaces settle a payment only once independent evidence shows the purchased work was actually delivered?" resource: "https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-stone-vcap-02.html" tags: ["pay", "endpoint", "ietf", "accept-agent-payments", "agent-checkout", "audit-agent-actions", "agent-to-agent-messaging"] status: draft generated: { by: agenticweb-builder/1.0, at: 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z } verified: { by: process:agenticweb-engine, at: 2026-10-29T00:00:00Z } stale_after: 2026-11-28T00:00:00Z sources: - id: ref-1 resource: "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-stone-vcap/" title: "draft-stone-vcap-02 is an Active Internet-Draft, Individual Submission, authored solely by Ben Stone of SwarmSync.AI, last updated 2026-09-04, with Intended status Informational and explicitly labeled 'not endorsed by the IETF' with 'no formal standing in the IETF standards process.'" last_modified: 2026-09-04T00:00:00Z - id: ref-2 resource: "https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-stone-vcap-02.html" title: "The draft's abstract defines VCAP as a settlement layer for autonomous AI agents that holds funds in escrow, verifies deliverables via independent verification engines, and releases or refunds payment based on machine-verifiable evidence, positioned as complementary to agent-to-agent communication protocols such as Google A2A rather than a replacement for them." last_modified: 2026-09-04T00:00:00Z --- # VCAP: Verified Commerce for Agent Protocols VCAP: Verified Commerce for Agent Protocols is an agentic-web standard (endpoint) at step 7, Pay, governed by IETF individual Internet-Draft; its status is "Active Internet-Draft". It answers: "How can two autonomous agent-run marketplaces settle a payment only once independent evidence shows the purchased work was actually delivered?" Implementation status is none found, last verified 2026-10-29. # Overview VCAP (Verified Commerce for Agent Protocols) is an Internet-Draft proposing an open settlement-layer standard for autonomous AI agent marketplaces: it specifies message formats, state machines, cryptographic bindings, and callback contracts that would let a marketplace hold funds in escrow, verify a deliverable through an independent verification engine, and release or refund payment based on machine-checkable evidence [^ref-1][^ref-2]. It positions itself explicitly as complementary to agent-to-agent communication protocols like Google's A2A or "the Agent Protocol" — those define how agents find and talk to each other, while VCAP defines how they pay each other with proof the work happened [^ref-2]. It does not define agent discovery or messaging itself, and it is an individual Internet-Draft (`draft-stone-vcap-02`), authored solely by Ben Stone of SwarmSync.AI, with no co-authors, no working group sponsorship, and no IETF endorsement — the IETF Datatracker page for the draft states plainly that "this I-D is not endorsed by the IETF and has no formal standing in the IETF standards process" [^ref-1]. Its draft header states `Intended status: Informational` (while the Datatracker stream field is `(None)` because no stream has adopted it). The current version, `-02`, was last updated 2026-09-04 (initial `-00` posted 2026-03-17), with an expiry date of 2027-03-08 under IETF's standard six-month draft-expiry rule [^ref-1]. SwarmSync.AI is the author's own agent-to-agent (A2A) marketplace (`swarmsync.ai`), which claims a proprietary reference implementation (`NestJS` backend, `Conduit` browser verification engine, and Stripe Connect Express settlement, with an interactive simulation on its homepage) and publishes a public specification repository with JSON schemas (`github.com/swarmsync-ai/vcap-spec`, last pushed 2026-06-14). A W3C AI-KR Community Group review note (published 2026-03-24) also discusses the draft, but no independent third-party marketplace, verifier, or agent client implementing VCAP was found as of 2026-10-29. # Examples ```http none none # parse: not applicable — no public endpoint to probe was located # on absent: No probe exists; this is an early-stage individual draft with no independent deployed implementation outside the author's own marketplace, so absence cannot be distinguished from non-adoption. ``` # Knowledge Graph * **Lifecycle Step**: [7 Pay](/category/pay/index.md) * **Pairs with**: [Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)](/okf/protocols/a2a.md), [ERC-8183: Agentic Commerce](/okf/protocols/erc-8183.md), [x402](/okf/protocols/x402.md), [Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)](/okf/protocols/ap2.md), [Agentic Commerce Protocol](/okf/protocols/agentic-commerce-protocol.md) * **Related terms**: [Agentic EoR (Employer / Entity of Record)](/okf/terms/agentic-eor.md) [^ref-1]: draft-stone-vcap-02 is an Active Internet-Draft, Individual Submission, authored solely by Ben Stone of SwarmSync.AI, last updated 2026-09-04, with Intended status Informational and explicitly labeled 'not endorsed by the IETF' with 'no formal standing in the IETF standards process.' (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-stone-vcap/) [^ref-2]: The draft's abstract defines VCAP as a settlement layer for autonomous AI agents that holds funds in escrow, verifies deliverables via independent verification engines, and releases or refunds payment based on machine-verifiable evidence, positioned as complementary to agent-to-agent communication protocols such as Google A2A rather than a replacement for them. (https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-stone-vcap-02.html)