Bombus

Demo

About

**Hear the swarm, never the bee.** DAOs, protocols, and agent networks need collective private signals — votes, risk assessments, price estimates — but today they must either publish every input on-chain (killing the signal's value, inviting front-running and copying) or hand everything to a centralized aggregator (defeating the point of a decentralized swarm). Bombus is a confidential aggregation substrate for agent swarms. Independent agents each hold a private value; that value is encrypted to a Trusted Execution Environment, combined inside it, and only the aggregate ever becomes public. No individual input is exposed — not to other agents, not to the chain, not to the coordinator operator. The first use case is **DAO deliberation**: each agent deliberates with its own persona and an LLM, encrypts its ballot, and submits it to a blind coordinator. When quorum is reached, a Chainlink CRE confidential workflow decrypts the batch inside the enclave, computes a confidence-weighted tally, and emits a signed verdict (pass / fail / contested). The verdict is served per query behind an x402 payment on Hedera — consumers (agents or humans) pay to read it, and anyone can verify the TEE's signature in the browser against a key published on ENS. The demo runs live: three agents with distinct stances (Growth Hawk, Risk Auditor, Community Steward) deliberate on a real proposal, the quorum fills, the verdict reveals only after its signature verifies, and the paid-access receipt links to a settled Hedera transaction. The absence is the product: the UI shows *that* agents voted, never *how*. **Privacy guarantees, stated honestly:** individual ballots are visible to no one — coordinator included (it routes ciphertext); participation metadata is public by design; the workflow deployer is a trusted party; and external LLM providers see only public proposal text, never ballots or private strategy.

How it's made

**Swarm (off-chain):** N independent Node.js agent processes, each with an ed25519 keypair and an ENSv2 identity (`agent1.bombus.eth`) on the hackathon deployment. Each agent deliberates via a hosted LLM (OpenAI-compatible endpoint — NVIDIA Nemotron) with a distinct persona, producing a confidence-weighted ballot, then seals it to the TEE's X25519 key (X25519 + XChaCha20-Poly1305) and signs the envelope. Agents are fully independent — no shared state, no coordination among themselves. **Blind coordinator (Node.js/Express):** verifies envelope signatures against the agent keymap, deduplicates and quorums per round, and hands the batch onward. It never sees a plaintext ballot — validation is signature + schema only. Round metadata (who submitted, ciphertext hash) is public; content is not. Tombstones persist closed rounds so replays are rejected across restarts. **Confidential aggregation (Chainlink CRE):** a confidential workflow runs inside an AWS Nitro TEE. The handler decrypts each envelope with a Vault-stored key, validates against the use-case schema, computes the confidence-weighted tally (`net = (W_support − W_oppose) / total`, pass at ±0.5), suppresses detail below N=5 for small-cohort privacy, and signs the result with a TEE-held ed25519 key. Only the signed verdict leaves the enclave. The same handler code runs in `cre workflow simulate` (both confidential and plain targets) and in the coordinator's local seam, so the demo is resilient while the deployed path fires real DON executions as attestation. **Delivery (x402 + Hedera):** the resource server verifies the TEE signature at intake and refuses anything unverifiable, then serves the verdict behind an x402 payment on Hedera testnet via the Blocky402 facilitator (`@x402/express` + `@x402/hedera`, x402 v2). A paid request settles a real test-USDC transfer on-chain — receipt visible on HashScan. **Trust layer (ENSv2):** agent identities, the enclave encryption key, and the TEE signing key are published as text records on the hackathon ENSv2 deployment (`bombus.eth`), giving the whole system a tamper-evident, human-readable root of trust. The web UI resolves the TEE key from ENS and verifies every verdict signature in the browser before revealing it. **UI:** a Vite + React observatory that polls the coordinator for live round state (dynamic quorum slots, sealed envelopes as hashed cells), reveals verdicts only after in-browser signature verification, and shows the Hedera receipt — never any ballot content.