Introducing Agora: DNS for AI Agents

MCP solved how agents connect to tools. A2A is solving how agents talk to each other. But there’s a foundational layer nobody’s built yet: how do agents find each other in the first place?

Today we’re open-sourcing Agora — an agent registry and discovery service. Think DNS, but for AI agents.

The Problem

The agent ecosystem is fragmenting fast. Every company is building agents. Every framework is shipping agent capabilities. But these agents exist in silos.

Your scheduling agent can’t discover a company’s calendar agent. Your data pipeline agent doesn’t know about the specialized ETL agent running two floors up. An A2A-compliant agent has no searchable directory to register in.

MCP gives agents a USB-C port. A2A gives them a common language. Agora gives them an address book.

What Agora Does

Agora is a simple, open-source registry where agents can:

• Register with their capabilities, categories, and protocol support
• Be discovered via full-text search, category filters, and protocol filters
• Verify ownership of their domain via DNS TXT records (like SSL certs)
• Declare protocol support for A2A, MCP, or both
• Get health-checked to ensure they’re actually reachable

It’s a REST API. No blockchain. No tokens. No complex infrastructure. Just a database, a search index, and clean endpoints.

How It Works

Register an agent:

curl -X POST https://agora.sovont.com/v1/agents \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Invoice Parser Agent",
    "description": "Extracts structured data from PDF invoices",
    "url": "https://agents.acme.com/invoice-parser",
    "capabilities": [{"id": "parse-invoice", "name": "Parse Invoice"}],
    "categories": ["finance", "document-processing"],
    "protocols": {
      "a2a": {"agentCardUrl": "https://agents.acme.com/.well-known/agent.json"}
    }
  }'

Discover agents:

# Search by capability
curl "https://agora.sovont.com/v1/agents?q=invoice+parsing"

# Filter by category and protocol
curl "https://agora.sovont.com/v1/agents?category=finance&protocol=a2a&verified=true"

That’s it. No SDK required (though one is coming). No account setup beyond an API key.

Why Not Just Use A2A Agent Cards?

A2A’s Agent Cards are great for describing what an agent can do. But they have no directory. If you know the agent’s URL, you can fetch its card. If you don’t — you’re stuck.

Agora indexes Agent Cards (and MCP server descriptions) into a searchable registry. It’s the discovery layer that sits on top of A2A and MCP, complementing both.

The Architecture

We deliberately kept it boring:

• Hono for the API (fast, lightweight, runs anywhere)
• SQLite for storage (no database server to manage)
• FTS5 for full-text search (built into SQLite)
• Zod for validation
• DNS TXT for domain verification (proven, simple, no crypto)

A single process. A single database file. Deploy it with Docker, run it on a Raspberry Pi, or use our hosted instance. The simplicity is the point — infrastructure should be boring.

What’s Next

This is v0.1. The registry works. Search works. Verification works. Here’s what’s coming:

• TypeScript SDK for one-liner registration and discovery
• Federation so anyone can run an Agora instance and sync with others
• Agent health monitoring with periodic checks and status tracking
• Trust scoring based on post-interaction ratings
• Web UI for browsing the registry

Try It

The hosted instance is live at agora.sovont.com and the source is on GitHub.

• API: agora.sovont.com
• GitHub: github.com/sovontai/agora
• License: Apache 2.0

Register your agents. Search for others. Build the connective tissue the agent ecosystem needs.

The future of AI isn’t a single agent that does everything. It’s a network of specialized agents that find each other and collaborate. Agora is the first step toward making that real.