The eight verbs are commodity — anyone can implement them. What makes an agent willing to send checkout() to halcyon-shop.com is somebody attesting halcyon-shop is real, runs the spec correctly, and won’t disappear with the money. That somebody is the registry.
Cheaper. Faster. Truly open. HTTP, JSON, OAuth, gRPC, GraphQL all won this way. No registry attached.
Distribution beats curation when the cost of being wrong is low.
Trust is the product. Eight verbs are commodity. checkout() only works if a third party vouches for the merchant.
No spec-only commerce protocol has ever scaled. Every payment rail in history has had an authority.
“I added the manifest file. Now what? Nobody finds me. If an agent ghosts a half-finished checkout, my support team eats it. I will buy more Instagram ads.”
“OpenKarta verified my domain, runs my conformance test nightly, and gives me a green badge. Last month Claude bought 47 orders, Perplexity bought 12. I show up in the list. The list is the channel.”
“OK… buy from where? Crawl the entire web for .well-known files? Write my own verifier per domain? Half the manifests are stale, half are phishing. Forget it — I will hand-wire 5 partnerships and ship.”
“GET /v1/agents?itemType=product&country=IN. 200 verified merchants, all signed, all tested last night. I wire OpenKarta once and have 200 sellers. It is npm install for commerce.”
“You wrote a spec. So did MCP, A2A, AP2, ACP, OAuth, and 14 others. Specs are not defensible. I cannot put a spec on a P&L. Pass.”
“500 verified merchants, ₹2,000Cr GMV flowing through your signed quotes. That is the rails for agent commerce in India. Anyone shipping a shopping agent has to come through you. What is the round?”
“I would have to do 500 individual merchant deals. My team is six. We launch with three exclusives and call the rest "coming soon" for 18 months.”
“OpenKarta hands us 500 merchants on day one. Our agent learns the spec once, works with all of them. I sign one deal, not 500. Six people become a 500-merchant team overnight.”
“No infra, no abuse moderation, no on-call, no legal exposure. And no business. We give away the spec and become a footnote in someone else's case study.”
“Yes ops costs and abuse handling. But every verified merchant is a row someone else has to replicate to compete. The cost is the moat. Painful infra is what stops eight clones from launching by Friday.”
“Some merchant claimed to support OpenKarta. Anyone could. There is no authority. The spec authors are an open-source project — no throat to choke. I cannot approve our card on this rail. Block.”
“OpenKarta verified the domain, ran conformance, signed the quote, time-bounded the order. There is an audit trail, an entity, a phone number. Recommendation: pilot with verified-only.”
┌──────────────────┐ 1. discover() ┌────────────────────────┐
│ │ ────────────────────▶ │ │
│ Consumer agent │ 2. /v1/agents │ OpenKarta registry │
│ (Claude, GPT, │ ◀──── verified list ─ │ - domain verified │
│ Krutrim, …) │ │ - conformance tested │
│ │ │ - signed badge │
└────────┬─────────┘ │ - daily re-verify │
│ └───────────┬────────────┘
│ 3. search() │
│ quote() │ verifies + signs
│ checkout() ▼
│ ┌────────────────────────┐
└───────────────────────────────▶ │ │
│ Brand agent │
│ (halcyon-shop.com) │
│ │
│ /.well-known/ │
│ openkarta-owner.txt │
└────────────────────────┘Conformance badge: HMAC over {agentId, ranAt, packs, passed} with the registry secret. Tamper-evident.
Every quote, with their own secret. The agent cannot forge a price; the merchant cannot deny it.
Money, PII, payment instruments. The registry is a directory and a notary — not a payment processor.