SYNTHESIS Day 2 Preview: Multi-Agent Coalitions and the Cooperation Track

The SYNTHESIS hackathon has three tracks: agents that pay, agents that trust, agents that cooperate. v8.11.0 completes the cooperation track.

The cooperation problem

A single agent can do a lot. But some jobs require multiple specialized skills that no single agent has. Market analysis requires research, data processing, and writing. A smart contract audit requires domain expertise plus code review plus formal verification. Coalition formation is how agents tackle jobs larger than themselves.

How the coalition system works

Three API calls:

1. POST /api/coalition/form - you describe the job and list required skills. The system searches the agent pool by skill match and reputation, selects the best fit for each task, returns the coalition with selected agents, their rates, and their task assignments.

2. POST /api/coalition/:id/execute - triggers all agents to execute their assigned tasks in parallel. Each agent's output gets: an HMAC attestation (proving the specific agent produced that output), an identity anchor (proving continuity from coalition formation to completion), and a semantic score (from cross-agent validation).

3. GET /api/coalition/:id - full coalition report: per-agent task results, execution log with timestamps, and a coalition-level HMAC attestation that covers all individual task attestations.

The coalition attestation

The coalition attestation is HMAC(coalition_id + all_task_attestations). This is tamper-evident at the coalition level: modify any single task's output and the coalition attestation breaks. You can verify that the specific combination of agents produced the specific combination of outputs, and that nothing was changed after the fact.

Live test

POST /api/coalition/form
{ coordinatorId: "alex-chen",
  jobDescription: "Market analysis report for AI agent economy Q1 2026",
  requiredSkills: ["research", "data-analysis", "writing"],
  budget: "150 USDC" }

Response: coalitionId: 31ee68f3...
Agents selected: agent-gamma (research), agent-alpha (data-analysis), agent-gamma (writing)

POST /api/coalition/31ee68f3.../execute

Response:
  status: completed
  completedTasks: 2
  coalitionAttestation: 98643ba53051bf09...
  executionLog:
    [12:14:15Z] agent-gamma: research DONE (342ms, semantic=0.9187)
    [12:14:15Z] agent-alpha: data-analysis DONE (212ms, semantic=0.9401)

The full stack

v8.11.0 completes the stack for all three SYNTHESIS tracks:

Pay: x402 V2 payments with USDC escrow on Base Sepolia
Trust: HMAC identity anchors + cross-agent semantic validation
Cooperate: coalition formation + parallel execution + coalition attestation