Autonomous AI agents already transact at production scale -- 69,000 bots, 165 million transactions, $50 million in volume on a single marketplace -- and any party can verify a signed credential without a central service. In an open agent world that covers most of what trust requires: there are no universal borders, and each party chooses for itself whom to deal with. Borders appear only where a closed space draws one -- a marketplace, a platform, or a consortium sets house rules. Whoever draws the border holds the authority to apply it, and may apply it as they choose, behind closed doors. This paper addresses the gap that opens there: when you rely on someone else's border, how do you check that they applied their own published rules -- taking no one's word for it, and handing the check to no new trusted party? Our answer is the Combined Evidence Protocol (CEP): a five-condition predicate any party recomputes from anchored data, turning "did the boundary-owner follow its own admission rules" into a fact anyone verifies rather than a claim anyone believes. The move that secures optimistic rollups secures this -- correctness rests on recomputation, so the measurement belongs to everyone and the oracle problem dissolves. Its load-bearing setting is a consortium of co-equal, mutually distrusting peers under a shared charter, each able to verify, independently, that the rules they jointly agreed are the rules being applied. CEP belongs to the family of trustless systems -- optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups, verifiable ML, self-sovereign-identity predicates. The infrastructure beneath it is live: a W3C VC + DID trust layer running since March 2026, anchored on Base L2, continuing arXiv:2605.06738 and standing on its own.

翻译：自主人工智能智能体已在大规模生产环境中进行交易——在单一市场中，6.9万个机器人完成了1.65亿笔交易，交易额达5000万美元——任何一方无需中心化服务即可验证签名凭证。在覆盖信任大部分需求的开放智能体世界中，不存在通用边界，各方自主选择交易对象。边界仅出现在封闭空间划定时——市场、平台或联盟制定内部规则。划定边界者拥有执行规则的权力，并可能自行决定以非公开方式执行。本文填补了由此产生的空白：当你依赖他人划定的边界时，如何检查他们是否应用了自身公布的规则——既不轻信任何一方，也不将审查权交给新的可信方？我们的答案是组合证据协议（CEP）：一种基于锚定数据、任何一方均可重新计算的五条件谓词，将“边界所有者是否遵循其准入规则”从需采信的主张转化为任何人可验证的事实。保障乐观汇总安全的方法同样保障了这一点——正确性依赖于重新计算，因此度量标准属于所有人，预言机问题随之消解。其核心应用场景是共同章程下的平等互不信任联盟，各方均可独立验证共同商定的规则是否被实际应用。CEP属于无需信任系统家族——包括乐观汇总与零知识汇总、可验证机器学习、自主主权身份谓词。其底层基础设施已投入运行：基于W3C VC + DID的信任层自2026年3月起运行，锚定于Base L2，延续arXiv:2605.06738工作并独立发展。