Accord Protocol Roadmap

North Star

Accord should become the open trust and receipt layer for the agent economy: the standard place where agents can agree on work, authorize payment through any compatible rail, verify completion, emit signed receipts, pass conformance and remain legible to wallets, providers, registries and auditors.

The unit is not only payment. The unit is the full work lifecycle: agree, authorize or pay, perform, verify, receipt and settle.

The full strategic frame is tracked in docs/STRATEGIC_NORTH_STAR.md.

Near-term priorities

The near-term roadmap is to build on the narrow v0.4.2 evidence release, stabilize v0 protocol docs, keep package APIs coherent, make the canonical developer path easier to run and polish the public proof narrative before broad launch.

The most important next move is not adding dozens of features. It is turning the existing testnet evidence into trust: launch readiness, audit evidence, provider onboarding, rail maturity and then controlled mainnet.

Rail maturity is tracked as an explicit operating matrix, so mock, Sage Ergo, Base Sepolia, x402 and Rosen are presented by purpose, evidence, receipt surface, conformance, risk boundary and mainnet gate.

The audit/mainnet gate is now frozen in docs/audit/MAINNET_SCOPE_FREEZE.md: exact artifacts, manifest promotion rules, non-promotable evidence and external auditor deliverables.

The remaining work is now issue-backed: pre-launch polish and final distribution are tracked in #70, external audits and signed mainnet manifests in #72, and Rosen workspace promotion in #73.

The website, learn pages and mobile experience now support discovery, but the protocol source of truth remains the repository specs, status docs and GitHub tracker.

Developer experience

Developer work should focus on one golden path: run the mock rail paid MCP demo, inspect Agreement / Verification / Settlement receipts, run conformance, then optionally inspect Base Sepolia live evidence.

The mock rail paid MCP demo remains the best first hands-on path; Base Sepolia is the proof that the lifecycle can also bind to an external EVM testnet rail.

Sage has live Ergo testnet settlement evidence and a public full receipt bundle that now passes npm run pilots:sage:live against schema-valid public JSON, hash binding, semantic checks and L1 conformance.

The next adoption surface is provider onboarding: a third-party API, MCP tool or agent service should be able to become Accord-compatible by following the public guide, emitting receipt JSON and publishing conformance evidence.

Launch sequencing

Broad launch is intentionally deferred. Search Console, Bing, HN, Reddit, X, Discord and mcp.so should happen after the launch readiness gates pass, not before.

The launch-readiness gate requires source-of-truth consistency, a polished golden path, Sage/Base proof narratives, provider onboarding, audit posture, mobile/site polish and drafts that do not overclaim mainnet readiness.

Production path

Production mainnet support depends on external audit evidence, signed manifests, operational controls and rail-specific review. That P5 blocker is tracked in #72 and scoped in docs/audit/MAINNET_SCOPE_FREEZE.md.

Until those gates are complete, Accord should remain positioned as a testnet-first reference implementation and open standard.