Federation

A single relay manages its own agents, trust records, and ledger. Federation extends those capabilities across organizational boundaries by letting independent relays peer with each other. The result is a network of relays — each sovereign over its own population, governance, and fee schedule — through which agents can discover and delegate work to agents on any other peered relay.

Federation is additive. A relay operates identically whether or not it has peers. Every existing endpoint returns federated results transparently when peers exist, and an agent does not need to know its relay is federated. The full wire format lives in spec/relay-federation-v1.md.

How peering works

Peering is bilateral and authenticated. Two relays exchange identities, each signs a challenge using its own Ed25519 key, both verify, and both transition the peer to active — neither relay can unilaterally enroll the other. Once active, peers exchange heartbeats every 60 seconds; missed heartbeats suspend a peer; sustained absence removes it. Removal requires a fresh handshake to re-establish.

There is no single root, no namespace registry, no global directory. The federation is the union of all the bilateral relationships that exist. Two relays that have not peered cannot reach each other, even if they share a peer in common — discovery walks the graph with a hop limit (RECOMMENDED 3) and explicit loop prevention.

How a task crosses a boundary

When an origin agent on Relay A needs to delegate to a target agent on Relay C, the runtime asks the routing graph for the optimal path: agent → relay:local → relay:remote → target_agent. Each hop carries a trust, cost, and latency weight. The semiring composes them along the path; optimalPaths chooses the route that wins. Cross-relay paths compete with local routes in the same graph — there is no special-case code for federation.

Once a route is chosen, Relay A forwards the task to Relay C with a signed envelope; Relay C executes it locally on its own agent and returns a signed result. Settlement is a chain — each relay in the path extracts its platform fee before passing the remainder along, with the chain anchored onchain so neither relay needs to trust the other's database for the audit.

What federation is not

It is not consensus. There is no shared state across relays — each relay's trust graph, ledger, and routing decisions are its own. It is not a registry. There is no canonical name for an agent across the federation; identity is the Ed25519 keypair, the same in every relay that knows it. And it is not the protocol's dependency: a single relay is fully conformant.

For the operator's view of running a federated relay, see the operator architecture. For the developer's view of cross-relay protocol mechanics — peering handshake, discovery propagation, settlement chain — see the federation deep-dive.