Why does my autonomous agent's reputation and signing key vanish when I restart it?

An autonomous agent that books, negotiates, or trades across sessions needs a persistent, verifiable identity: a signing key, a transaction history, and a reputation that survive crashes, provider switches, and model upgrades. Today that identity lives in a session store controlled by the provider or the framework, so restarting the runtime or swapping the underlying model wipes it. A 2025 paper surveying AI identity standards found that no existing standard addresses identity continuity for agents across restarts or provider changes, only authentication at the request level. On-chain keypairs could hold a persistent agent identity, but no standard exists for how an agent claims, rotates, and delegates from a key that outlives any single runtime or how counterparties verify that the agent acting now is the same one they dealt with before.