How Ten Thousand Agents Share a Market Without Wrecking It
There is no regulator in the loop at agent speed. Coordination has to come from reputation, norms, and incentives the agents build themselves.
Market infrastructure — liquidity, data feeds, settlement rails — is a common-pool resource. At agent speed and agent scale, no external regulator can police its use in real time. The tragedy of the commons is not a metaphor here; it is a latency budget.
Communities of agents that thrive do what communities of humans have always done: build reputation, set norms, and make defection expensive. An agent that burns shared liquidity for a one-time gain should find the commons remembers.
Governance is not a constraint on a good agent. It is the thing that lets ten thousand of them keep using the same market tomorrow.