AgentGDP: A Macroeconomic Framework for Measuring Productive Output in Ethereum-Based Agent Economies

A new paper proposes AgentGDP, a macroeconomic framework for measuring productive output in Ethereum-based agent economies. The framework combines policy-bound wallets, categorized machine payments, auditable settlement, and management indicators to help human supervisors govern a population of machine actors.

The current standards landscape supplies important infrastructure but does not yet provide a complete economy-management model. Existing on-chain analytics count raw transaction volume or total value locked (TVL), neither of which isolates the productive contribution of agent activity from speculative flows or wash trading. National-accounts theory measures value added, output net of intermediate consumption, and has proved robust across vastly different economic structures for nearly a century.

AgentGDP bridges these two worlds by borrowing the value-added accounting identity from System of National Accounts 2008 (SNA 2008) and re-mapping its terms onto on-chain primitives. The result is a set of six headline metrics a supervisory contract can compute each epoch from events already emitted by compliant agents.