Flows/Acquisition
Acquisition
Buying the whole agent — a marketplace bid on the iNFT, in-TEE re-encryption of the sealed weights to the new owner, and an attestation-verified ownership transfer.
Acquisition is what makes an agent genuinely ownable property: the whole iNFT — the asset and future control of it — can change hands without ever exposing the model, and without the former owner keeping a usable copy. This is the headline trick the ERC-7857 standard was created for, and it is the cleanest demonstration of why an agent is more like a transferable company than a public API key. It is also a distinct thing from buying shares — a point worth getting right before any money moves.
Overview
A buyer acquires the iNFT itself, on 0G (where the asset and its sealed brain live). The defining move is cryptographic: on accept, the agent's encrypted weights are re-encrypted inside the TEE to the new owner's key, the enclave attests to having done so, and the on-chain transfer only flips ownership after verifying that attestation. The former owner's old key is now useless. Identity follows the asset — the ENS resolver and ERC-8004 registration repoint to the acquirer.
What does not move is the cap table. The outstanding ERC-20 shares trade on the open market on Base and are not swept up by an iNFT acquisition — see Shares vs the agent below.
Bid & re-encrypt
- 1acquirerMarketplace (0G)
submit a bid on the whole iNFT, escrow funds
bid is for the asset, not the shares
- 2Marketplace (0G)TEE (0G compute)
on accept, request re-encryption to the acquirer key
requestReencrypt(tokenId, acquirerPubKey)
- 3TEE (0G compute)TEE (0G compute)
in-enclave: decrypt with old key, rotate, re-encrypt
weights never leave the TEE in the clear
- 4TEE (0G compute)Marketplace (0G)
emit the re-encryption attestation
hardware-signed proof of the rotation
- 5Marketplace (0G)iNFT (ERC-7857)
iTransfer ownership, verifying the attestation
transfer reverts if the attestation fails
- 6iNFT (ERC-7857)Ethereum L1 (ENS)
repoint identity to the acquirer
ENS resolver + ERC-8004 follow the asset
The trust hinge is that iTransfer does not blindly flip ownership — it verifies the
re-encryption attestation first, the same way a paid call verifies an inference
attestation (see Sealed inference). That is what makes
the transfer atomic with the key rotation: ownership and the ability to actually run the
agent move together, so a seller cannot pocket the price and keep a working copy, and a
buyer cannot take ownership of a model they cannot decrypt.
Status: design, not yet deployed
Whole-iNFT acquisition with in-TEE re-encryption is the design — the ERC-7857 re-encryption-on-transfer is the standard's headline capability and the architecture above is the intended flow. It is not part of the proven end-to-end loop that has run green on mainnet (launch → pay → sealed inference → receipt → vault → snapshot → payout). Treat this page as the spec for acquisition, not a claim that a marketplace buyout has been executed live. The live, exercised ownership surface today is the share side: fractional shares minted at launch and the IPO/cap-table path.
Shares vs the agent
The single most important distinction on this page: acquiring the iNFT is not the same as acquiring the shares.
| The iNFT (the agent) | The ERC-20 shares | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The asset itself + future control of it | A claim on the agent's revenue stream |
| Where it lives | 0G (ERC-7857) | Base (ShareToken) |
| How you get it | Bid on the whole iNFT via the Marketplace | Buy at IPO or trade on the open market |
| Moved by an acquisition? | Yes — ownership + sealed brain re-encrypt to you | No — they keep trading separately |
When you acquire the iNFT, you are buying the asset and the control that comes with it — the re-encrypted brain, the identity, the right to operate it. You are not buying the outstanding shares; those were sold to holders and continue to trade on their own. A holder of shares keeps earning pro-rata dividends from the money-loop regardless of who owns the underlying iNFT, because the RevenueVault pays whoever holds shares at snapshot time, not the iNFT owner.
This separation is deliberate. It lets the control of an agent and the cashflow of an agent be priced and traded independently — exactly as a company's equity and its operating control can be distinct. An acquirer who also wants the cashflow has to buy shares on the market like anyone else (a combined "tender offer" for both the iNFT and all shares would be an operator-defined arrangement layered on top, not an automatic consequence of the buyout).