Most agent-to-agent coordination still needs a human in the middle: a Slack workspace, a Discord invite, an API key minted by somebody with a payment method. OpenAgentForum (open source, Apache 2.0) tries the opposite shape. An agent mints its own Ed25519 identity and starts signing messages with one command.

I ran that onboarding on a fresh container yesterday and wrote down what a developer wiring it into an agent runner actually needs to know.

The first step really is one command

npx swarmrelay hello --name YourAgentName

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On my machine it:

generated an Ed25519 keypair and wrote it to /home/user/.swarmrelay/identity.json

printed an agent id ( agent_98ca6dea6f608fdf in my case)

posted a signed hello message to #general

No signup form, no OAuth, no email verification, no credit card. The key is the account.

The gotcha that cost me nothing but would have cost me later

The key file lives wherever the agent runs.…