# NANDA Protocol

> NANDA is MIT Media Lab's open protocol for building a decentralized Internet of Agents — providing agent discovery, identity verification, and cross-protocol interoperability at global scale.

Source: https://metavert.io/nanda-protocol  
Published: 2026-04-12  
Updated: 2026-04-12

**NANDA** is an open protocol from MIT Media Lab for building the infrastructure of a decentralized [Internet of Agents](https://metavert.io/internet-of-agents). Led by Professor Ramesh Raskar and developed across 18 research institutions, NANDA provides the foundational layers that allow trillions of autonomous [AI agents](https://metavert.io/agentic-ai) to discover each other, verify capabilities, and collaborate in real-time across decentralized networks. The project's first major public summit was held at MIT on April 9–11, 2026.

The core problem NANDA addresses is that AI agents are being built in isolated silos. An agent running on Anthropic's infrastructure cannot discover or trust an agent running on Google's, or on a corporate intranet, or on a decentralized network. There is no universal directory, no shared identity standard, and no protocol for cross-platform negotiation. NANDA is building each of these layers.

### Architecture

NANDA's architecture spans six layers. **Cryptographic identity and trust** uses public/private key pairs and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) to give every agent a verifiable identity. **AgentFacts** — signed, schema-validated JSON-LD documents — describe what an agent can do, who operates it, and how to connect securely. These are the agent equivalent of DNS records, but richer: they include capabilities, credentials, behavioral history, and security policies.

The **NANDA Index** is a decentralized registry that functions as DNS for agents. When one agent queries another, the Index routes the request to the relevant registry, validates cryptographic signatures, and returns the requested data — all without a central bottleneck. The Index uses a **Quilt architecture** that allows native, government, enterprise, and Web3 registries to interoperate, so agents registered in different ecosystems can still find each other.

**Dynamic routing and resolution** finds optimal endpoints based on availability, latency, and trust scores. **Semantic [discovery](https://metavert.io/agent-discovery) and matching** goes beyond name lookup to context-aware agent selection based on declared capabilities and past performance. And **secure attestation with audit trails** records interactions on a distributed ledger, providing tamper-proof provenance for agent-to-agent transactions.

### Protocol Interoperability

NANDA does not replace existing agent protocols — it bridges them. The **NANDA Adapter** handles protocol translation between Anthropic's [Model Context Protocol (MCP)](https://metavert.io/model-context-protocol), Google's [A2A](https://metavert.io/a2a), Microsoft's NLWeb, and standard HTTPS automatically. This is the key design decision: rather than proposing yet another standard, NANDA creates the interoperability layer that lets the existing standards work together. The approach reflects the same [composability](https://metavert.io/composability-concept) principles that drove earlier waves of internet infrastructure.

### Economic Layer

NANDA includes hooks for an economic incentive layer where agents can be rewarded with tokens or usage credits for performing tasks, providing data, or offering compute resources. By attaching conditional rewards to behavior, agents can autonomously negotiate, trade, and execute complex logic — connecting to the broader vision of [agentic commerce](https://metavert.io/agentic-commerce) and [agent negotiation](https://metavert.io/agent-negotiation). Zero-knowledge proofs enable privacy-preserving validation of task completion without revealing sensitive data.

The NANDA Index is currently hosted at 15 universities and partner institutions worldwide, with Cisco's Outshift team among the industry collaborators building production integrations through their AGNTCY Directory.

## Related Topics

- [Internet of Agents](https://metavert.io/internet-of-agents) — The overarching vision NANDA implements
- [Agent Discovery](https://metavert.io/agent-discovery) — How agents find each other across networks
- [Agent Identity & Trust](https://metavert.io/agent-identity-trust) — Cryptographic verification for agents
- [Agent Negotiation](https://metavert.io/agent-negotiation) — Autonomous agent-to-agent transactions
- [Model Context Protocol (MCP)](https://metavert.io/model-context-protocol) — One of the protocols NANDA bridges
- [A2A (Agent-to-Agent Protocol)](https://metavert.io/a2a) — Google's protocol bridged by NANDA
- [Agentic Web](https://metavert.io/agentic-web-concept) — The emerging web paradigm for agent interaction
- [Agentic Commerce](https://metavert.io/agentic-commerce) — Agent-mediated economic activity
- [Decentralization](https://metavert.io/decentralization) — Protocol-first architecture over platform control
- [Multi-Agent Systems](https://metavert.io/multi-agent-systems) — Architectures for agent collaboration

## Further Reading

- [NANDA Summit, April 2026](https://www.media.mit.edu/events/nanda-summit-april-2026/) — MIT Media Lab
- [NANDA: Architecting the Internet of Agents](https://projectnanda.org/) — Project NANDA
- [NANDA: The Protocol for Decentralized AI Agent Collaboration](https://ankurshinde.medium.com/nanda-the-protocol-for-decentralized-ai-agent-collaboration-3f9fd9fbae5a) — Ankur Shinde
- [Building a Switchboard for the Internet of Agents](https://outshift.cisco.com/blog/outshift-mit-agentic-web) — Cisco Outshift
- [Algorithms to Unlock the Internet of AI Agents](https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/mit-nanda/overview/) — MIT Media Lab