# Programmable economic relationships ## Beyond transactions: programming how agents connect and commit Programmable economic relationships are a capability provided by ESP's Economic API allowing agents to computationally define, instantiate, and manage complex, stateful economic interactions and commitments that go beyond simple, stateless asset transfers. Examples include shared risk, conditional commitments, dynamic credit, staking into future outcomes, or reputation-informed trust. In the Economic Space Protocol (ESP), these relationships are defined as protocol objects—modular, composable, and updatable by the agents themselves. Unlike markets, which reduce relationships to one-off exchanges, and smart contracts, which are often rigid or isolated, ESP enables flexible, adaptive, and meaningful economic bonds. These relationships carry memory, directionality, and contextual semantics. Much of economic life revolves around relationships – trust, commitment, shared risk, ongoing collaboration. Legacy economic systems often struggle to represent these digitally beyond simple contracts or platform-mediated connections. They primarily offer APIs for basic transactions. The Economic Space Protocol (ESP) elevates relationships to become programmable primitives, accessible via the Economic API at the Edge. This means agents can directly initiate and manage interactions with embedded logic, memory, and dynamism: * Encoding Commitments: Agents can use the API to enter into computationally enforceable commitments. * Staking: stake(target, amount, conditions) allows agents to lock value as a signal of trust, a requirement for participation, or a claim on future yield, with conditions managed by protocol. * Performance Bonds: Commitments can be tied to validating the outcomes of specific actions (Performances). * Structuring Credit & Liquidity: The API enables distributed credit systems. * issue_credit(recipient, amount, terms) allows peers or collectives to extend credit based on programmable rules (potentially incorporating reputation or prior relationship state), bypassing traditional intermediaries. * Protocols can define automated clearing and settlement logic. * Managing Shared Risk: Agents can form agreements where risk is distributed according to programmable logic, creating forms of mutual insurance or collective investment vehicles with embedded rules. * Stateful Interactions: Unlike stateless transactions, these programmed relationships have memory. The protocol tracks the history of commitments, repayments, validations, etc., allowing this history to influence future interactions and capabilities (e.g., building reputation, adjusting credit limits). * Composable Bonds: These relationship primitives can be combined to create sophisticated structures – DAOs whose governance is tied to staking relationships, supply chains coordinated via programmable commitments, marketplaces with embedded reputation impacting interaction rights. ### Significance: Making relationships programmable via the Economic API fundamentally changes the nature of online economic coordination. It lets networks not just trade, but to remember, trust, and transform – it lets us * Encode how agents depend on and invest in one another * Formalize cooperative structures across time * Embed social and semantic meaning into coordination logic This is because programmable relationships allow: * Trust to become computable without collapsing it into reputation scores * Risk to be shared, pooled, or delegated over time * Credit to be extended, dynamically adjusted based on performance or behavior * Commitments to be formalized, monitored, and evolved * Stake to be composable across multiple agents, protocols, and time horizons ### Networks become relationally aware, and economic agency becomes a matter of composition, not compliance.