If you've shipped anything that hands an AI agent real authority — signing payments, pushing commits, calling APIs on your behalf — you know the knot in your stomach when that agent needs your private key to do literally anything useful. According to PR Newswire, the Algorand Foundation just dropped AC2 — short for Agentic Communication and Control Protocol — an open-source, blockchain-agnostic standard designed to put an end to that knot. The spec, reference implementation, wallet proof-of-concept and developer plugin are all live today, and the foundation is actively inviting design partners to weigh in.
What AC2 actually solves
Here's the problem we keep dancing around: existing channels for talking to your AI agent — email, WhatsApp, Telegram — offer no cryptographic identity verification, no standardized delegation, and no clean way to approve a single action without handing over the keys entirely. AC2 steps into that gap with a direct, end-to-end encrypted WebRTC channel between your wallet or app and the agent. When the agent needs to sign something — a payment, a git commit, an API authorization — it sends a request through AC2. You review and approve from inside your own wallet UI, the signature gets delegated back to the agent, and your private key never leaves your control. "The answer is you don't hand them the keys, you approve each use of them," Marc Vanlerberghe, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at the Algorand Foundation, told PR Newswire.
This is essentially the "rumored vs. confirmed" question every developer building agentic systems has been quietly wrestling with — who actually has the authority to act on my behalf, and how do I prove it without losing custody. If you want to see a more colorful version of that exact dilemma playing out in pop culture, the full list of rumored and confirmed contestants for Dancing With the Stars Season 35 makes for an entertaining parallel read.
Under the hood: what we get to play with
Let's walk through what ships today. The protocol leans on DIDComm v2.0 message formats for cross-system interoperability, passkey-based authentication via Liquid Auth (built on top of FIDO2/WebAuthn), and supports real-time voice and text streaming alongside signing delegation. Because AC2 is extension-friendly, any message type or signing format can be added — making it usable for any domain where agents need scoped, user-approved authority.
A few concrete workflows from the announcement:
- A coding agent drafts code and asks the developer to approve the final digital signature before it's published.
- An AI assistant sends transaction details directly to your wallet, where you review and approve before any payment goes through.
- A shopping agent constructs an AP2 Intent Mandate, defining exactly what it's authorized to buy and at what price, then submits it to the user for sign-off before acting autonomously.
And critically for our corner of Web3: AC2 requires no central message relay and no blockchain to operate. It's transport-layer plumbing, not consensus — which means it's framework-agnostic and easy to bolt onto whatever stack you're already running.
What to do today
The reference implementation, an open-source wallet proof-of-concept, and an OpenClaw plugin for end-to-end developer testing are all available now — which means we can stop theorizing and start poking at round-trip latency on actual signing requests this weekend. If you've been holding off on agentic features because of custody concerns, sketch how your current flow would shift if every action required a wallet-side approval: AC2 is essentially that primitive, standardized. And if you've got a real production use case in mind, the foundation is taking design partner applications right now, so this is the moment to get in on the spec while it's still malleable.