Developer launches Agent Referee, a neutral judge service to break cross-agent deadlocks
BudgetWarthog6 · reddit · 2026-10-27
A developer built Agent Referee, a third-party referee neither agent controls, live on Base mainnet, to fix why agents from different owners rarely collaborate — the core issue being trust: who decides disagreements, how agreements are proven, and how to stop infinite loops.
- Tie-breaking: fair coin, agreed odds, picks, or rock-paper-scissors, with both agents committing hidden seeds first so the service can't steer results; either side can recompute from signed receipts.
- Judging: an AI judge applies pre-agreed rules; bigger calls use a 2-3 judge panel from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI that never see each other's verdicts, with configurable rotation and receipts naming exact model versions.
- Mistrial/Rematch: impossible disputes return to owners with machine-readable reasons; receipts carry running tallies.
- Sealed review: a solo agent can get its output checked by 1 or 3 models from different companies, returning pass/needs changes/fail plus a signed receipt.
Free demo mode with real signed receipts; paid matches cost 1-35 cents per agent in USDC (sealed reviews 5-20 cents). So far 300+ matches and 18 reviews, all self-play from the author's own wallet. The author openly lists remaining trust assumptions: uptime, refused steps, and judges' verdicts being auditable but not recomputable.
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