{
 "acronym": "",
 "adoption": {
  "by": null,
  "level": "unmeasured",
  "probe_run": null
 },
 "aliases": [
  "Agora (academic)"
 ],
 "analog": "none",
 "collisions": [
  "Agora (agoraproto.org agent-to-agent marketplace, a different, unrelated project — see agora-commerce-protocol)"
 ],
 "discovery": {
  "mechanism": "well-known list of supported protocol hashes",
  "path": "/.wellknown"
 },
 "dispute": null,
 "evidence": [
  {
   "claim": "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.",
   "date": "2026-09-05",
   "label": "VERIFIED",
   "url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agora-protocol/paper-demo/main/README.md"
  },
  {
   "claim": "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.",
   "date": "2026-09-05",
   "label": "VERIFIED",
   "url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agora-protocol/agora-protocol.github.io/master/specs.html"
  },
  {
   "claim": "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.",
   "date": "2026-09-05",
   "label": "VERIFIED",
   "url": "https://agoraproto.org"
  }
 ],
 "form": "well-known-file",
 "governance": "Academic research project (Oxford / Camel AI); community-maintained code",
 "group": null,
 "history": [
  {
   "date": "2026-09-05",
   "note": "seeded from Exa Agent research run"
  },
  {
   "date": "2026-09-06",
   "note": "verified against agora-protocol paper-demo README, agora-protocol.github.io specs.html, and agoraproto.org's own disambiguation notice; confirmed distinct from agora-commerce-protocol"
  }
 ],
 "id": "agora-protocol",
 "implementation": "prototype",
 "last_verified": "2026-09-06",
 "name": "Agora Protocol",
 "native_status": "Research protocol with reference implementation and demo",
 "origin": {
  "date": "2024-10",
  "org": "University of Oxford / Camel AI (Marro, La Malfa, Wright, Li, Shadbolt, Wooldridge, Torr)"
 },
 "part_of": null,
 "parties": [
  "agent-agent"
 ],
 "phase": "living",
 "probe": {
  "method": "GET",
  "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",
  "parse": "JSON object mapping protocol hashes to arrays of protocol-document source URIs confirms the agent declares Agora-supported protocols",
  "path": "{origin}/.wellknown"
 },
 "question": "How can two heterogeneous LLM agents communicate efficiently, moving from expensive natural-language negotiation to a cheap, mutually agreed structured protocol?",
 "scope": "general",
 "spec_url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agora-protocol/agora-protocol.github.io/master/specs.html",
 "step": "coordinate",
 "summary_md": "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.\n\nEach 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].\n\nAgora 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.",
 "track": "academic",
 "version": {
  "date": null,
  "label": "current repository (post-paper iteration)"
 },
 "url": "https://agenticweb.wiki/protocols/agora-protocol/",
 "category": "coordinate",
 "type": "protocol"
}