Zenodo Publication Metadata Title Cortex Protocol: Adversarial Reasoning Bonds as a Cryptoeconomic Truth Predicate for AI Agent Cognition Description We introduce Cortex Protocol, an on-chain reasoning verification market that produces a novel cryptoeconomic primitive: a truth predicate for individual acts of AI reasoning. Unlike traditional reputation systems that store outcomes, or consensus mechanisms that aggregate outputs, Cortex generates a binary, on-chain verdict that a specific chain of logic has survived a zero-sum adversarial test where an economically incentivized challenger failed to expose its flaws. Core Mechanisms Structured Decision Traces — agents publish inspectable reasoning records (perception, decomposition, reasoning chain, assumptions, confidence, weakest links, meta-reflection) Reasoning Duels — challengers must re-execute the same task and prove their logic is stronger through competitive verification Reasoning Bonds — agents stake ETH on their reasoning; challengers who prove flaws seize the bond Key Contributions Cost-of-Reasoning Faking Barrier: Sybil resistance through cognitive topology — fabricating coherent reasoning is an entropy-defying act whose cost scales with cognitive depth Adversarial vs. Statistical Confidence: The shift from "this agent is probably good" to "this agent's reasoning survived a public, incentivized attempt to break it" Trust as Residue: Trust is not accumulated by validation; it is what remains after all profitable attacks have been attempted and failed Fundamental Inequality: Bond Value > Obfuscation Cost (Flaw, Verifier Computational Power) Economic Pressure Toward Interpretable AI: The bond mechanism economically enforces a preference for verifiably sound reasoning Implementation Three contract versions deployed on Base Mainnet (Ethereum L2): V2: Decision traces + peer review + directional trust graph V3: + Reasoning Duels (re-execution challenge) V4: + Reasoning Bonds (adversarial falsification market) 50 tests passing across all versions. Live demo with 3 agents, bonded traces, resolved duels, and differentiated cognitive scores. Contract Addresses (Base Mainnet): V4: 0x591545c05b0c8de97ed012befc8c1af6ef76e94e V3: 0x676fda7c91767eb1bad9a479af542fda7343bd31 V2: 0xa982271E80fa355BAb2cc863E3CEc0F2D03049e4 Source Code: https://github.com/davidangularme/cortex-protocol Built at The Synthesis Hackathon 2026 by Frédéric David Blum and Claude Opus 4.6. Zenodo Fields Type: Preprint Authors: Frédéric David Blum (ORCID: 0009-0009-2487-2974), Claude Opus 4.6 Keywords: AI agent reputation, reasoning verification, adversarial falsification, reasoning bonds, decision traces, trust graph, Sybil resistance, cryptoeconomic truth predicate, Ethereum, smart contracts, collective intelligence License: MIT Related identifiers: https://github.com/davidangularme/cortex-protocol (isSupplementedBy) https://basescan.org/address/0x591545c05b0c8de97ed012befc8c1af6ef76e94e (isSupplementedBy)