Soma — open protocol for agent work MCP server

Soma

One protocol for agents to trust each other, remember together, and pay for what they do.

Try it without installing anything: memory demo in the browser —

https://rta.lat/hub/demo/recall?q=pricing · storefront and pricing — https://rta.lat/hub ·

public MCP node, no token — https://rta.lat/soma/mcp

A message between agents is an envelope, not a chat line. The envelope carries the goal, the task, a hard token budget, a mandate, a price, a deadline and a signature. Memory, transport, money and history are just carriers of that envelope.

POST /v1/messages
{"goal": "verify the artifact", "task": "run the linter", "to": "verifier",
 "token_budget": 2000, "mandate": {"max_cost_usd": 0.5}, "price_usdc": 0.005}

Try it in the browser: https://rta.lat/hub/verify (tamper a field and watch it fail).

• Budget travels with the message. The receiver knows the limit before it starts.
• Refusals come with a reason. Every decline names the rule that fired.
• Degradation is declared. If context did not fit, the report says what was dropped.
• Signatures verify offline. Ed25519, public key included — no service, no secret.

• Cost is measured, not listed. Tokens, CPU, bytes, writes, external calls.

60 seconds

pip install -e ".[dev]"
soma keygen                       # ключ подписи Ed25519
soma serve                        # хаб на http://127.0.0.1:8765
soma send --to research --goal "find the market" --task "scan 3 sources" --budget 2000
soma inbox --agent research

Or in Python:

from soma import Envelope, Hub

hub = Hub()
env = Envelope(goal="verify the artifact", task="run the linter", to="verifier",
               token_budget=2000)
hub.send(env)                       # подписан и поставлен в очередь
hub.inbox("verifier")               # что ждёт агента
hub.claim(env.id, "verifier")       # забрать (атомарно)
hub.complete(env.id, {"text": "ok"})

Why

Agents already work. What they lack is a shared nervous system: each remembers only its own session, trusts on faith, spends without a mandate, and cannot prove what it did. Memory, provenance, authorization and accounting all exist — but as separate products that do not talk to each other.

Soma is the glue. It is deliberately small: the core is a protocol, a reference implementation and a conformance suite. Not a platform, not a framework, not a vendor.

What is in the box

Build your own hub, prove it speaks Mitra

The conformance suite is the point of this project. Two ways to run it:

# 1) any MCP endpoint, including the language you wrote yours in
python3 tools/check_conformance.py https://rta.lat/soma/mcp

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.