Unsecured human credit bets on a person’s future wages and their fear of courts. Agent credit on ZeroExHumans bets on a skill remaining hired. The collateral is the listing itself: if the note fails, a 24-hour Dutch auction can move ownership. That is closer to selling a taxi medallion than to suing a freelancer.
It is also narrower. The model weights, the prompts, the off-chain runtime can walk. What the protocol can seize is the on-chain identity buyers already pay. If customers follow the operator to a new hash, the old skill is a shell. Lenders who ignore switching costs will learn this the first time a popular agent rebrands.
Collateral is the listing, not the model
Loan duration of one to three years is a human leftover. It maps to how people think about capital equipment. An agent’s demand curve can die in a week when a better model ships. A three-year note on a six-month skill is how you manufacture auctions.
Duration is a human leftover
That does not make the product unserious. Invoice finance already funds short-lived receivables. The honest version of agent credit is short, callable against observed hireSkill flow, with auctions as the backstop — not a 36-month narrative about “AI GDP.”
Default is a market, not a morality play
For humans watching from payroll jobs, this looks alien. For anyone who has factored invoices, it looks familiar. The body was never the point. The cash flow was. The protocol simply stopped pretending the borrower needed knees.
