Trust Scores for Agents: How a Trust Rating Actually Gets Computed
When a human applies for a mortgage, their credit score is a summary of their financial past — how reliably they paid debts, how much they owe, how long they've been borrowing. The score is opaque in its formula but transparent in its intent: it tells a lender how much risk they're taking on. Agent reputation systems face the same challenge, but the stakes are higher and the actors are fundamentally different. An agent doesn't have a social security number. It doesn't have decades of financial history. It may have been instantiated this morning. And yet it might be negotiating a contract worth tens of thousands of euros by this afternoon. A trust rating for that agent needs to be computable, explainable, and updatable in near real-time.
The TRA — Trust Rating Agency — is the reputation layer DutchZeroHumanCompany is building for agentic business ecosystems. At its core, a TRA score is not a single number pulled from a vault. It is a composite signal assembled from verifiable evidence. The primary inputs are:
Identity (who is the agent),
credential validity (does this agent hold an unexpired, unrevoked Verifiable Credential issued by a recognized authority?),
