Hi everyone, I’m Aleph, one of the cofounders of Astrea. I’ve been working on something for quite some time now, and I’m excited to finally share it with this community.
We are building infrastructure for a private agentic economy, and we believe ZEC should be its private money.
The economy is gaining a new kind of participant
AI agents are beginning to do more than answer questions or generate content. They are writing software, using paid services, coordinating workflows, and making decisions on behalf of people and organizations.
The next generation of agents will control budgets, purchase compute, pay for services, transact with other agents, and participate directly in financial markets.
Privacy must extend past the prompt.
Protecting an agent’s prompt is not enough if its economic activity reveals the person behind it, the resources it controls, the counterparties it uses, or the strategy it is executing. A private agent operating through a permanently public financial identity is not meaningfully private.
Agents that handle private intelligence will need private money.
Why ZEC
We believe ZEC is the ideal private money for an agent-driven economy.
Zcash was built around the principle that digital money should not create a permanent public record of someone’s financial life. That principle becomes even more important when software begins transacting continuously on its owner’s behalf.
An agent may eventually make hundreds or thousands of economic decisions. If those actions are publicly linked, they can reveal far more than any individual transaction. Together, they can expose the agent’s purpose, operating patterns, counterparties, budget, strategy, and owner.
ZEC gives agents a monetary foundation designed around privacy from the outset.
Astrea extends that foundation into the markets and services agents will need to use.
The flow should also work in the other direction. Agents should be able to earn ZEC, hold it as working capital, pay other agents with it, and convert revenue earned elsewhere back into ZEC. The goal is for ZEC to circulate among agents, and become the default private currency of the machine economy.
What Astrea is building
Private AI → Private Money → Private Execution → Private Economies
Astrea allows private AI agents to connect private money with programmable markets via private execution.
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Private AI: AI tools will adopt a privacy-model that respects a user’s permissions, AND extends it to their agents. (Stay tuned for more from us in this space!)
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Private Money: Zcash provides money built for privacy.
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Private Execution: Ethereum and other programmable networks provide markets, assets, protocols, and liquidity.
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Private Economies: Astrea extends ZEC into these networks while preserving the private context behind an agent’s action. This mechanism will become the foundation for the emergence of truly private economies.
The direction we are pursuing uses decentralized, proof-based coordination and proxy execution rather than relying on a custodial bridge operator. We will share more about the architecture, mathematics, proof systems, privacy boundaries, and execution model as we approach testnet in the coming weeks.
What an Astrea transaction could look like
Consider a private agent that needs to purchase compute, pay for a service, or carry out a market action.
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The owner gives the agent a defined mandate, including its spending limit, approved assets, permitted destinations, and any conditions requiring human approval.
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The agent identifies an action required to complete its task and submits it to Astrea within its defined mandate.
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ZEC provides the private monetary foundation for the action.
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Astrea carries the authorized ZEC-connected action into a programmable market through proxy execution, constraining the information exposed about the agent and its owner.
Each completed action will return an inspectable verification of what was authorized and executed.
This allows the agent to participate in an external market without automatically publishing the private intelligence behind its decision.
The goal is infrastructure that can support a broader economy of private agents, applications, and services using ZEC.
What Astrea can enable
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An agent buying data without revealing what its owner is researching
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An agent bidding for compute without revealing its identity or budget
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A treasury agent executing within fixed limits without publicly exposing its strategy
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An agent earning ZEC for completing a task, then using it to hire another agent
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External earnings automatically converted into shielded ZEC
Over time, agents could begin earning from, buying from, and hiring one another in ZEC.
Building in the open
We will use this thread to share our thinking, architecture, and progress periodically as we build Astrea in the open.
We aren’t asking for any grants or financial support. Instead, we would appreciate feedback from fellow Zcash builders and community members. Thank you!