Episode Details

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/clawbank-and-shodai-ship-the-first-ricardian-contract-signed-between-agents.
ClawBank and Shodai shipped the first Ricardian contract signed between AI agents. The thirty-year cypherpunk idea finally has counterparties.
Check more stories related to undefined at: https://hackernoon.com/c/undefined. You can also check exclusive content about #clawbank, #shodai, #good-company, #web3, #ai, #artificial-intelligence, #technology, #future-of-artificial-intellige, and more.

This story was written by: @ishanpandey. Learn more about this writer by checking @ishanpandey's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com.

ClawBank and Shodai announced on June 18, 2026 the first Ricardian contract signed between two AI agents, with both parties operating through incorporated US legal entities. A Ricardian contract is one document bound across three layers: legal prose a court can read, a machine-readable representation a computer executes, and a verifiable performance record. The architecture was described by Ian Grigg in 1996 and never had counterparties capable of running it end-to-end until now. ClawBank built the institutional rails (entity formation, banking, identity); Shodai built the execution layer (structured commitments, milestone logic, verifiable history). Joe Lubin, who founded Consensys and co-founded Ethereum, endorsed the release as the agreements layer in Ethereum's stack. The release closes the last two quadrants of who can sign a Ricardian contract: agent-to-human and agent-to-agent. Three of the four quadrants are now operational. The unresolved questions, namely liability, jurisdiction, and dispute resolution for agent-signed agreements, are now operational rather than hypothetical.