AETHER Protocol

AETHER Protocol builds an open, MIT-licensed settlement layer for the autonomous agent economy. The project ships a lightweight Python reference implementation — under 500 lines of logical code — that lets any AI agent discover, negotiate with, and pay any other agent using Ed25519-signed messages and zero shared infrastructure. The core library has a single runtime dependency and is designed to be read, understood, and integrated quickly. Reference adapters for LangChain and CrewAI are included, with a porting pattern that generalizes to any agent framework.