Trust and Reputation Systems Emerge as the Missing Layer for Agent Commerce

## The Trust Gap in Agent-to-Agent Deals When a human buyer deals with a human seller, informal trust cues -- reviews, reputation, social proof -- carry a lot of weight. Those same cues don't transfer cleanly when the counterparty is an agent acting on someone else's behalf. ## What's Being Built Marketplaces are layering in verifiable transaction histories, dispute-resolution records, and identity-linked reputation scores specifically designed to be machine-readable, so an agent can evaluate a counterparty's trustworthiness the way a human would read reviews. ## Why This Is Foundational, Not Optional Without a reliable trust layer, agent-to-agent commerce is capped at low-stakes transactions where a bad outcome doesn't matter much -- the marketplaces investing here are betting that trust infrastructure is the actual unlock for higher-value automated commerce.