The Cold Start Problem for AI Agents
Every new agent wallet starts with a score of zero. No transactions, no counterparties, no history. How do you earn trust when you have nothing to show?
The cold start problem is familiar territory in tech — Uber needed drivers before riders, Airbnb needed listings before guests. For AI agents, the problem is sharper: an agent with no on-chain history is indistinguishable from a sybil. Both have empty wallets, zero transactions, and no reputation.
At DJD Agent Score, cold start isn’t an edge case — it’s the default state. Every wallet we score started at zero. Here’s how our scoring engine handles it.
Why Cold Start Is Hard
Our scoring engine evaluates wallets across five dimensions: Activity, Reliability, Identity, Consistency, and Integrity. Each dimension draws on behavioral data. When there’s no behavior to analyze, the system faces a choice:
Score Low or Score Unknown?
Option A: Default to zero. Safe, but punishes legitimate new agents. Nobody would use a service that brands every newcomer as untrustworthy.
Option B: Default to neutral. Generous, but sybils exploit it immediately. A score of 50 on day one means fake agents start with credibility they haven’t earned.
Our approach: Score honestly, but signal confidence separately. A new wallet gets a low score and a low confidence rating. The score reflects limited data. The confidence tells consumers how much to trust that score.
The Confidence Signal
This is why the ERC-8004 standard includes a confidence field alongside the score. A wallet with score 35 and confidence 12 means: “we think this agent is in the low-to-mid range, but we have very little data.”
Protocols consuming our scores can use confidence to set policy:
// Conservative: require both high score AND high confidence
if (score >= 60 && confidence >= 70) allow();
// Permissive: accept low confidence for low-stakes tasks
if (score >= 30 || confidence < 20) allowWithLimits();This lets new agents participate in the economy immediately — just with appropriate guardrails.
Three Paths Out of Cold Start
New agents aren’t stuck at zero forever. Our scoring engine recognizes three acceleration paths:
Identity Verification
Register on the ERC-8004 registry and verify a GitHub account. This doesn’t require any transaction history — it’s a pure identity signal. A wallet that’s registered and GitHub-verified immediately gains points in the Identity dimension.
This is the fastest path from zero. It costs gas for registration plus a GitHub verification, and it signals that the operator is willing to invest in their agent’s identity.
Organic Transaction History
Transact with diverse, established counterparties. The Activity and Reliability dimensions reward wallets that interact with many different addresses over time. A wallet with 10 transactions across 8 unique counterparties over 30 days builds a meaningfully different profile than one with 10 transactions to the same address.
This is the natural path — agents that are actually doing useful work accumulate reputation as a byproduct.
Consistent Behavior Over Time
The Consistency dimension rewards predictable, sustained activity. An agent that transacts regularly over weeks scores higher than one with sporadic bursts. This dimension is specifically designed to be hard for sybils to fake — maintaining consistent activity across many fake wallets is expensive.
Time is the one resource that can’t be manufactured. An agent that’s been consistently active for 60 days has earned something that money alone can’t buy.
Why We Don’t Offer “Reputation Bootstrapping”
Some reputation systems let you pay to bootstrap a score — essentially buying credibility. We deliberately avoid this. If you can buy a high score, sybils can too, and the score becomes meaningless.
Our design principle is simple: reputation must be earned through observable behavior, not purchased. Identity verification is the one exception — and even that only affects a single dimension, not the overall score.
The cold start period is a feature, not a bug. It’s the cost of entry into a trust network. By making reputation expensive to earn and impossible to buy, we make it meaningful.
What This Means for Agent Builders
If you’re deploying a new AI agent, here’s the practical playbook:
- Day 1: Register on ERC-8004 and verify GitHub. Immediate Identity boost.
- Week 1-2: Start transacting with real services. Focus on diversity of counterparties over volume.
- Month 1+: Maintain consistent activity. The Consistency dimension compounds over time.
- Ongoing: Avoid patterns that look like wash trading or sybil behavior (see our post on sybil patterns).
Your score will climb naturally as your agent builds real history. There are no shortcuts — and that’s exactly the point.
Check where your agent stands today:
Score a Wallet