Ledger-State Stigmergy: A Formal Framework for Indirect Coordination Grounded in Distributed Ledger State
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866914446524284928 |
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| author | García, Fernando Paredes |
| author_facet | García, Fernando Paredes |
| contents | Autonomous software agents on blockchains solve distributed-coordination problems by reading shared ledger state instead of exchanging direct messages. Liquidation keepers, arbitrage bots, and other autonomous on-chain agents watch balances, contract storage, and event logs; when conditions change, they act. The ledger therefore functions as a replicated shared-state medium through which decentralized agents coordinate indirectly. This form of indirect coordination mirrors what Grassé called stigmergy in 1959: organisms coordinating through traces left in a shared environment, with no central plan.
Stigmergy has mature formalizations in swarm intelligence and multi-agent systems, and on-chain agents already behave stigmergically in practice, but no prior application-layer framework cleanly bridges the two. We introduce Indirect coordination grounded in ledger state (Coordinación indirecta basada en el estado del registro contable) as a ledger-specific applied definition that maps Grassé's mechanism onto distributed ledger technology. We operationalize this with a state-transition formalism, identify three recurring base on-chain coordination patterns (State-Flag, Event-Signal, Threshold- Trigger) together with a Commit-Reveal sequencing overlay, and work through a State-Flag task-board example to compare ledger-state coordination analytically with off-chain messaging and centralized orchestration. The contribution is a reusable vocabulary, a ledger-specific formal mapping, and design guidance for decentralized coordination over replicated shared state at the application layer. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_03997 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Ledger-State Stigmergy: A Formal Framework for Indirect Coordination Grounded in Distributed Ledger State García, Fernando Paredes Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Multiagent Systems Autonomous software agents on blockchains solve distributed-coordination problems by reading shared ledger state instead of exchanging direct messages. Liquidation keepers, arbitrage bots, and other autonomous on-chain agents watch balances, contract storage, and event logs; when conditions change, they act. The ledger therefore functions as a replicated shared-state medium through which decentralized agents coordinate indirectly. This form of indirect coordination mirrors what Grassé called stigmergy in 1959: organisms coordinating through traces left in a shared environment, with no central plan. Stigmergy has mature formalizations in swarm intelligence and multi-agent systems, and on-chain agents already behave stigmergically in practice, but no prior application-layer framework cleanly bridges the two. We introduce Indirect coordination grounded in ledger state (Coordinación indirecta basada en el estado del registro contable) as a ledger-specific applied definition that maps Grassé's mechanism onto distributed ledger technology. We operationalize this with a state-transition formalism, identify three recurring base on-chain coordination patterns (State-Flag, Event-Signal, Threshold- Trigger) together with a Commit-Reveal sequencing overlay, and work through a State-Flag task-board example to compare ledger-state coordination analytically with off-chain messaging and centralized orchestration. The contribution is a reusable vocabulary, a ledger-specific formal mapping, and design guidance for decentralized coordination over replicated shared state at the application layer. |
| title | Ledger-State Stigmergy: A Formal Framework for Indirect Coordination Grounded in Distributed Ledger State |
| topic | Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Multiagent Systems |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03997 |