Cambridge University postgraduate student, Yash Bharti, has been awarded $200,000 by Cantor8, to fund and support cutting edge research into standardising agentic AI systems in the Canton Network ecosystem.
Cantor8 has awarded $200,000 in research funding to Yash Bharti, a postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge, in order to support the development of a Canton-native standard protocol specifically for agentic AI.
“Without a standard protocol, each bilateral agent integration requires bespoke negotiation and custom tooling, replicating the fragmentation that Canton was built to eliminate. Early Canton pilots in capital markets have demonstrated cross-application transaction composability; extending this to the agent layer is the natural next step”, reads the research proposal.
The Agentic AI sector is expected to generate up to $450 billion in economic value by 2028, and the future of financially-focused AI agents is onchain.
As major institutional participants on @CantonNetwork develop highly functional AI agents, a standard protocol to provide such agents with legitimacy, advertise their capabilities, and establish multi-party workflows is not a feature - it is a necessity.
Cantor8 boasts partnerships with blockchain organisations at Cambridge University, Oxford University, Imperial College London, and other leading academic institutions, including Ivy League schools in the US.
It is through these partnerships that Cantor8 is able to direct the best talent that such institutions have to offer toward building out the future of the Canton Network and, thereby, the future of large-scale institutional finance.
The Researcher: Yash Bharti
Yash is an academic of the highest order, having already received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation to develop advanced encryption algorithms and secure smart contract patterns.
"The rise of agentic payments systems is inevitable, and Canton is the only blockchain equipped to deliver the compliance and privacy requirements that institutions demand," said Yash Bharti. "Building infrastructure to support this is one of the most exciting opportunities in today's industry.”
Having originally studied for his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at NYU’s College of Arts and Science, Yash is now undertaking a master’s degree at The University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. He has also carried out research at Harvard University’s Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory and New York University’s Robotics Laboratory.
Yash’ professional experience is no less impressive, however. He served as a Research Engineer at the A16z-backed PIN AI before carrying out a similar role at Humanity Protocol, which has received investment from the likes of Pantera Capital and Jump Crypto.
Beyond this, Yash has conducted multiple research projects across both web3/cryptography and artificial intelligence/machine learning. He is also a core team member of Cambridge University’s Cambridge Blockchain Society - an existing partner of Cantor8.
“Researchers of Yash’ calibre are few and far between and Canton is fortunate to have his talent and enthusiasm directed towards building out the future of its AI ecosystem,” said Cantor8 CEO & co-founder, Philip Kaddaj. “Cantor8 is proud to serve as the bridge between researchers at tier-one universities and the Canton Network itself”.
Yash’ immersion in tier-one academic settings, combined with both his exploits in AI-specific research and his experience with Rust, Solidity, C++, Java (and many other programming languages) makes him the ideal candidate to ignite Canton's inevitable agentic AI ecosystem.
The Research: Agent Interoperability for Institutions
In layman’s terms, Yash’ research proposal offers an intention to develop and implement a Canton Improvement Proposal (CIP) which will introduce a standard protocol which will, in turn, allow agents to advertise their capabilities, build legitimacy and trust, and execute multi-party workflows.
AI Agents on Canton Make Sense...
It is not just Canton’s native scalability features that make it the ideal environment for AI agents to carry out complex financial operations. Typically, when AI agents communicate and interact, data is exchanged and shared. In the case of both institutional and everyday use cases, this data can be highly sensitive.
AI agents on Canton, however, inherit the network’s distinct privacy capabilities, including its ability to simultaneously provide both transaction-level privacy and regulatory compliance. Through this, Canton can allow for complex transactions to take place, while safeguarding the potentially-sensitive information required to do them.
“Canton’s primitives - sub-transaction privacy, multi-party atomic composition, and Daml authorization - already solve the trust and coordination problems that other ecosystems must engineer from scratch. This CIP extends those primitives to the agent layer.”
In still simpler terms, the research aims to design an equivalent of Ethereum’s ERC-8004, which acts as a ‘trust layer’ for AI agents to establish reputation and establish identity.
As with ERC-8004, Canton’s AI trust layer will consist of three registries:
Agent Capability Registry: Provides a DAML-based template through which institutional parties register their agents, including service capabilities, terms of service, and privacy specifications.
Service Request Registry: Designed to match agent end users with agent providers, effectively offering a privacy-preserving marketplace for the use of Canton-native agentic AI.
Service Record Registry: Offers a compliant, privacy-preserving interaction history for interactions between multiple parties, detailing outcomes, performance metrics, and more, thereby allowing agent systems to establish reputation.
Though far from simple in its architecture, the research proposals aims are simple - To facilitate the inevitable advent of agentic AI within the Canton Network ecosystem, purpose-built for large-scale institutional participants for whom privacy, reliability and compliance are non-negotiables.
Cantor8’s University & Academic Ecosystem
Cantor8 has already formed partnerships with some of the world’s leading academic institutions, across Cambridge University, Oxford University, Imperial College London, and UC Berkeley.
Driving real innovation and research within the Canton Network ecosystem is a primary goal of these partnerships, with Cantor8 bringing network, funding, and industry understanding to some of the best researchers and academics from around the world.
Cantor8 is open to exploring Canton-focused research collaborations with any-and-all interested parties. If you have a proposal for a research initiative and are looking for support and funding, please reach out to jonny@cantor8.tech with details of your proposal.
