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Agora Protocol

Coordinate Agora (the academic protocol, arXiv:2410.11905) is a cross-platform communication protocol for networks of heterogeneous LLM-based agents, from University of Oxford and Camel AI researchers [1]. It solves the cost/scalability problem of agent-to-agent natural-language chat: two agents ("Alice" and "Bob" in the spec's running example) initially converse in natural language via their LLMs; when a communication pattern recurs, they use their LLMs to negotiate a shared structured protocol (typically JSON) in a handful of rounds; once agreed, each side writes a deterministic "routine" (a small script) implementing its side, after which further exchanges no longer require invoking an LLM at all [2]. This lets very different agents that have never met communicate at low up-front cost while converging toward near-zero marginal cost, which the authors frame as achieving efficiency, versatility, and portability simultaneously.

Overview

Each Agora message is a JSON envelope carrying protocolHash (a hash of the negotiated protocol document, or null for natural-language exchanges), protocolSources (URIs where the protocol document can be fetched), and a body; responses carry status ("success"/"failure") and body [2]. Agents may expose a /.wellknown endpoint listing the protocol hashes and source URIs they already support, letting a sender skip negotiation entirely when a suitable shared protocol already exists [2].

Agora does not define payments, identity/authentication, or a marketplace — it is purely a communication/negotiation protocol between agents that already know how to reach each other over HTTPS. It is explicitly and importantly a different project from the same-named agent marketplace at agoraproto.org (see agora-commerce-protocol); agoraproto.org's own site states this disambiguation directly [3]. As of this verification, the project's code has moved past the original paper-demo (aimed at a 100-agent network with mixed LLM backends and DB technologies) toward an updated HuggingFace demo and a general-purpose Python library, but there is no versioned "1.0" release and no measured count of production deployments — it remains a research/community project rather than a standards-track spec. Governance is informal (the original academic authors plus open community contribution via GitHub/Discord); no formal standards body is involved.

Discovery and probe

well-known list of supported protocol hashes · /.wellknown

GET {origin}/.wellknown
parse:     JSON object mapping protocol hashes to arrays of protocol-document source URIs confirms the agent declares Agora-supported protocols
on absent: Absence means the agent does not advertise pre-negotiated protocols and any Agora exchange would fall back to natural-language negotiation over the same transaction envelope

Live check run by the MCP probe: GET /.wellknown. Agora agents declare supported protocols as a JSON map at /.wellknown (sic).

{
 "path": "/.wellknown",
 "expect": {
  "content_type": "json"
 },
 "note": "Agora agents declare supported protocols as a JSON map at /.wellknown (sic)."
}

History

Instances

Every instance with its source is listed on the instances page.

See also

References

  1. Agora: "A Scalable Communication Protocol for Networks of LLMs" (arXiv:2410.11905) is authored by Samuele Marro, Emanuele La Malfa, Jesse Wright, Guohao Li, Nigel Shadbolt, Michael Wooldridge, and Philip Torr, affiliated with the University of Oxford and Camel AI. — https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agora-protocol/paper-demo/main/README.md (2026-09-05) VERIFIED
  2. The Agora specification defines a three-tier interaction model (natural language, LLM-negotiated structured protocol, then deterministic routine scripts), a JSON transaction envelope (protocolHash, protocolSources, body/status), and a /.wellknown endpoint agents expose to advertise supported protocol hashes and their sources. — https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agora-protocol/agora-protocol.github.io/master/specs.html (2026-09-05) VERIFIED
  3. agoraproto.org's own machine-readable manifest explicitly disambiguates itself from "the academic 'Agora Protocol' paper by Marro et al. — that is a different project that happens to share the name," confirming the two Agoras are unrelated. — https://agoraproto.org (2026-09-05) VERIFIED

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