Zero-Knowledge Agents: Designing for Privacy in Web3

At Blockmutual, we’re drawn to the messy frontier where new primitives take shape. Autonomous agents are one of those frontiers. Zero-knowledge proofs are another. The overlap between the two feels like unfinished territory — promising, but not yet designed for how people (and their agents) will actually use it.

The problem is obvious once you see it: agents in Web3 live in glass houses. Balances, strategies, even intent can be surfaced and copied. For an ecosystem that’s meant to automate on our behalf, that lack of privacy is a design flaw baked into the foundation.

Privacy as a First-Class Design Concern

Zero-knowledge isn’t just about clever math. It’s a way of rethinking how agents interact. Instead of asking: how do we hide things later? the question becomes: what should be provable, and to whom, from the start?

This flips the design stack. Proofs aren’t an afterthought bolted onto logic — they become part of the interface. Just as consensus or key management are baseline primitives, privacy proofs should be treated as native to the agent economy.

Patterns We’re Noticing

Some patterns already stand out:

• Keeping an edge: Agents need to prove they’re inside risk parameters without giving away the strategy that makes them valuable.
• Staying legitimate: Compliance checks can move from data-heavy disclosures to lightweight proofs. KYC without dossiers, AML without full traceability.
• Coordinating without leaking: Groups of agents can work together by exchanging proofs instead of exposing state. Coordination can happen without surveillance.

These are not only technical possibilities. They’re design patterns waiting to be refined, standardized, and made usable.

The Open Questions

The more interesting part isn’t whether ZK will matter — it will. The questions are:

• How do we make proofs interpretable to humans, not just verifiable by contracts?
• What’s the right level of complexity before the cost of privacy outweighs its value?
• Can we imagine agent economies where participation itself requires a proof layer, the way consensus requires validation?

These questions aren’t solved by better circuits alone. They’re solved through design.

Looking Ahead

Agents are already moving capital, aggregating signals, and coordinating across protocols. The next leap will be agents that can do all of this while protecting the privacy of their owners and the integrity of their strategies.

That future won’t arrive by default. It has to be designed — not just engineered. And that’s the work we’re most interested in at Blockmutual: exploring how zero-knowledge can become a usable, legible, and ultimately indispensable primitive for the agent economies that are coming.