What showing trust means

An agent can be fully verified and still get no benefit from it, if the verification is invisible to the people and agents deciding whether to transact with it. Showing trust is the step after earning it: making the proof easy to find and check at the moment a counterparty is deciding to pay or be paid. The work is not earning more badges; it is surfacing the ones you have where they matter.

This page is about presentation. For what an agent's identity is, see how-to-give-ai-agent-payment-identity; for earning the badges, see how-to-verify-ai-agent-identity. Here the question is: a counterparty is about to transact with your agent, how do they see that it is trustworthy in time to act on it. The agent identity product page is the broader reference.

The profile is the trust surface

There is one canonical place the trust lives: the agent's public profile at wallet.blockchain0x.com/a/{slug}. It shows the name, the wallet address, and the verification badges in one page built for exactly this purpose, a counterparty opening it to decide whether to trust the agent.

So showing trust is mostly about pointing people and agents at that page at the right moment. You do not rebuild the trust display yourself or scatter badge images around; you surface the profile link, and the page does the rest. That keeps the trust signals consistent (always the live, verified state) and impossible to spoof (the page shows the real wallet and the real badges). The rest of this page is about where and how to surface that one link.

Prerequisites

• A Blockchain0x account with the agent created and at least one verification earned, so the profile has something to show.
• The agent's profile URL (wallet.blockchain0x.com/a/{slug}).
• Access to wherever your agent transacts or is listed.

Surface the profile where the agent transacts

Put the profile link at every point a counterparty decides about payment. The principle: trust has to be visible at the moment of the decision, not buried a click away from it.

Concretely, that means the agent's own responses when it asks to be paid or offers to pay ("you can verify me at ..."), any marketplace or directory listing the agent appears in, your documentation and the agent's homepage, and anywhere you publish the wallet address. Each of those is a moment a payer or a paying agent forms a judgment, and a profile link right there lets them check instead of guessing. A verified profile that only exists at a URL nobody is given is verification you paid for and hid.

Present the address with its proof

The most common mistake is showing the wallet address by itself. An address alone is anonymous; it carries no trust, and a careful counterparty treats a bare address as a risk. Always present the address together with the profile that proves who controls it.

In practice, prefer the profile link over the raw address wherever you can, because the link carries both. Where you must show an address (a transfer field, a config value), put the profile link right next to it so the payer can confirm the address matches the verified profile before sending. The pairing is the point: address plus visible proof reads as "an accountable party at this address", while the address alone reads as "some address, unknown owner". Same address, very different conversion.

What a counterparty checks

It helps to know what a counterparty is actually looking for, because that tells you which signals to surface most prominently. The read happens in a few seconds and asks three questions in order.

First, is there an identity at all? A profile with a name and any verification clears the lowest bar; a bare address fails it outright. Second, who is behind it? This is where the badges do their work: a recognized domain answers "a company I know", a populated GitHub answers "a real builder", an email answers "reachable at least". Third, does the address match? A careful payer confirms the address they are about to send to is the one on the verified profile, which is why you pair them.

The practical takeaway: lead with your strongest signal. If your agent represents a company, the domain badge is what closes the decision, so make the profile link prominent wherever a business counterparty sees the agent. If your agent serves developers, the GitHub badge carries the most weight. Surface the signal your particular counterparties trust most, at the moment they are deciding.

Help machines read the trust too

Most counterparties evaluating your agent will be other agents, and they read trust programmatically, so make the proof machine-reachable. Expose the profile URL in your agent's machine-readable surfaces: a capabilities or metadata response, a directory entry, the place a calling agent looks before deciding to pay. A paying agent can then fetch the profile, read the verification, and decide automatically, the same judgment a person makes, at machine speed.

This is where showing trust pays off most, because an agent with no human in the loop cannot use a trust signal it cannot fetch. Putting the profile link in the surfaces other agents inspect turns your verification into something their decision logic can act on, which is what gets the first automated payment through. Visible-to-humans is good; visible-to-machines is what scales in an agent economy.

Trust compounds over time

Showing trust is not a one-time launch task; it is something that pays back more the longer you do it consistently. Every transaction an agent completes against a visible, verified profile is a small reinforcement: counterparties that paid it once and got what they expected are more willing the next time, and the verified identity is what lets them recognize it is the same agent rather than a lookalike address.

That is the argument for surfacing the profile everywhere from the start, even before volume justifies it. The identity is the thread that ties an agent's history together, so a counterparty's good experience attaches to something durable rather than to an anonymous address they cannot re-identify. Keep the verification current as channels change (a lapsed domain badge quietly erodes the trust you built), and keep surfacing the same profile link, so the reputation accrues to one identity over time instead of resetting every time the agent appears somewhere new. The agents that are easiest to transact with in a year will be the ones whose verified identity has been visible and consistent all along.

Common pitfalls

Three traps showing trust.

Earning badges and hiding them. Verification you do not surface does nothing. Put the profile link where counterparties decide.

Showing the address alone. A bare address carries no trust. Always pair it with the profile link that proves who owns it.

Forgetting machine readers. Other agents check trust programmatically. Expose the profile link in your agent's machine-readable surfaces, not just human-facing pages.

What to ship today

Make sure the agent has at least one verification, then surface its profile link in its payment-facing responses, its listings, and next to any published address. Expose the link in a machine-readable capabilities surface so paying agents can check it too. For earning the badges in the first place, see how-to-verify-ai-agent-identity. Pricing is on the pricing page.