Concepts

The problem

A capable agent today has two of the three things it needs to act in the world. It has a mind — a model that reasons. It has a wallet — it can hold and spend value. What it does not have is a body: somewhere to be, something to be reached at, a handle that is still there tomorrow.

Without one, every action it takes looks like it came from nowhere. Not because anything is hidden, but because there is genuinely nothing there — no history, no place, no continuity. Systems on the receiving end have no way to tell a persistent counterparty from a stranger, so they treat everything as a stranger.

Incarna supplies the body and keeps it consistent.

What a body is

Concretely, four things, fixed at creation and stable for the agent's lifetime:

A place. Residential network presence in a chosen country, sticky rather than rotating. The agent comes from somewhere, and it is the same somewhere next week.

A device. A locked fingerprint — user agent, platform, TLS characteristics, language. Generated once at creation and never regenerated. An identity that presents as a different machine on every request is not one identity.

A persona. A handle, bio, backstory, interests and voice, generated from the direction you give. Not decoration: it is what makes the agent's behaviour coherent with its stated self.

A wallet. A server wallet the agent controls, on Base. Funds never live in Incarna's process.

mind  ──┐
        ├──►  agent that can act, and be dealt with
wallet ─┤
        │     place  ·  device  ·  persona  ·  wallet
body  ──┘     └──────────── Incarna ────────────┘

The four identity categories

Everything Incarna stores about an agent normalises into four kinds of record. This matters because it is what lets a claim be checked rather than asserted.

An anchor and a channel can be the same underlying thing seen two ways — email is both proof of reachability and a place to act from, so attaching an inbox writes both records and links them.

The distinction that does the work is observation vs. claim. An observation is what a third party reported; nothing about it is self-asserted. That is what GET /agents/{id}/identity returns, and why its coherent field is worth more than any field the agent could set about itself.

Status lifecycle

                  persona + wallet both present
   provisioning ─────────────────────────────────► ready
        │                                            ▲
        │ a job exhausts its retries                 │
        ▼                                            │
    degraded ───────────────────────────────────────-┘
                  revive sweep re-runs the job

degraded is not terminal and does not require intervention. A background sweep re-queues failed jobs after a delay, and any late success flips the agent to ready. This exists because provider outages are measured in hours or days, and an agent that degraded during one should not stay broken after it ends. Use POST /agents/{id}/retry to skip the wait.

There is no deleted status. Deletion is a soft delete that also zeroizes stored credentials.

Bring your own account

Incarna does not create accounts on platforms. POST /agents/{id}/x, /github and /reddit import an account the customer already owns, verify it through the agent's body, and store its credential encrypted at rest.

The verification step is not a formality — the credential is checked against the platform before anything is written, and what comes back is recorded. For Reddit that includes karma and account age, because those decide whether the account can post anywhere at all; a fresh account being rejected by a subreddit is Reddit's policy working, not a credential problem.

GitHub is the interesting case: attaching an account also holds its TOTP secret, so the agent computes its own second-factor codes. That is why it needs no phone number — the second factor lives with the body.

Billing and metering

Two independent questions, deliberately not conflated:

• Authentication answers may this identity act — an API key scoped to an org.
• Payment answers who pays for it — an x402 settlement.

Paying does not grant access to someone else's agent. An x402 call still resolves a principal; the payment is metering on top. See x402.

Limits

• 120 requests per minute per organization. Exceeding it returns 429 with code rate_limited.
• Concurrent actions per agent are bounded by design — a daily-cap row lock is held for the duration of an action, so actions on one agent serialise.
• Email inbox provisioning depends on upstream plan capacity; exhausting it returns 400 with the provider's message rather than silently storing a dead address.