Blockchain Security and Privacy in the Age of Agentic AI

The rapid emergence of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how digital systems perceive information, make decisions, use tools, interact with services, and execute actions autonomously. Unlike conventional AI models, AI agents can operate continuously, coordinate with other agents, access sensitive data, manage digital assets, and initiate transactions with limited human intervention. Blockchain and other decentralized technologies offer promising foundations for establishing trust, provenance, accountability, and tamper-resistant coordination among autonomous agents. However, their integration also introduces significant new security and privacy challenges. Autonomous agents may become targets for prompt injection, identity spoofing, model manipulation, data leakage, malicious tool use, smart contract exploits, and coordinated multi-agent attacks. Moreover, transparent blockchain infrastructures can conflict with the confidentiality requirements of agents operating on proprietary, personal, or sensitive information. This Research Topic aims to advance the foundations, mechanisms, architectures, and practical applications required to secure and preserve privacy in blockchain-enabled agentic AI ecosystems. We seek to address a central question: how can decentralized systems enable AI agents to act autonomously while remaining trustworthy, accountable, secure, and privacy-preserving? Potential solutions may combine blockchain-based trust and identity mechanisms with cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution, privacy-enhancing technologies, secure multi-agent coordination, verifiable AI inference, and auditable governance frameworks. The Research Topic also encourages investigations into emerging threats at the intersection of autonomous AI and decentralized systems, including agent-driven attacks, vulnerabilities in AI-controlled smart contracts, adversarial manipulation of decentralized agents, and new forms of economic or consensus attacks. Both theoretical advances and practical evidence are needed to develop robust security models and deployable solutions. We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes: - Security architectures for blockchain-enabled AI agents and multi-agent systems; - Decentralized identity, authentication, authorization, and access control for autonomous agents; - Privacy-preserving agent communication, data sharing, and coordination; - Zero-knowledge proofs, verifiable computation, ZKML, and verifiable AI agent actions; - Secure and privacy-preserving smart contracts and agent-to-agent transactions; - AI provenance, accountability, auditability, and reputation in decentralized ecosystems; - Threat modeling, vulnerability analysis, and attack detection for agentic blockchain systems; - Agentic AI for blockchain and smart contract security; - Economic security, incentive mechanisms, and governance for autonomous agents; - Trusted execution environments and other hardware-assisted security approaches; - Regulatory, ethical, and practical challenges in deploying secure agentic AI systems. We invite Original Research, Review, Systematic Review, Methods, Technology and Code, Brief Research Report, Perspective, and other relevant manuscript types that provide rigorous theoretical, empirical, or practical contributions. Submissions presenting novel frameworks, algorithms, prototypes, benchmarks, datasets, threat analyses, and real-world case studies are particularly encouraged. Topic editors: Stephen Fan, Sara Rouhani Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86024/blockchain-security-and-privacy-in-the-age-of-agentic-ai