what are trust zones? - every principal-agent delegation implicitly forms a trust zone - the agent does work on behalf of the principal inside of the zone, using resources/permissions that the principal has placed into the zone - inside the zone, the agent can operate freely, but is constrained by the boundary of the zone, which keeps the agent aligned with the principal - the "harder" that boundary, the lower the risk that the agent will do things the principal doesn't want; but creating a hard boundary is costly and can also make the agent's job more difficult - there are several ways to harden the boundary (aka trust zone parameters), and they can be combined and remixed to achieve the right balance of cost, agent effectiveness, and hardness - by formalizing this into a framework, we can program the logic into smart contracts to a) make trust zones cheap to fork and remix and extend, and b) to take advantage of the unique type of hardness that blockchains offer - Hats Protocol v1 is the first version of exactly that: a protocol for programming trust zones (aka "hats") https://x.com/hatsprotocol/status/1986458735095517526