Intentide: A Pre-Settlement Collective Intent Stability Network for Autonomous Procurement of Scarce Capacity

Agentic commerce protocols enable autonomous agents to authenticate mandates, authorize payments, and complete purchases at machine speed. However, no existing control layer addresses whether thousands of individually valid agents will synchronize demand for the same scarce capacity at the same instant. Merchant queues absorb load only after checkout intent forms; authorization frameworks such as AP2 and UCP verify individual legitimacy but cannot measure collective risk across independent participants; financial circuit breakers halt trading after price or volume shocks have already occurred. Each mechanism intervenes too late or at the wrong abstraction layer, permitting irreversible resource capture while collective demand risk remains unresolved.

This paper introduces Intentide (Pre-settlement Collective Intent Stability Network, PCISN), a proposed architecture that treats synchronized machine demand as a first-class pre-settlement stability problem - analogous to congestion control in network infrastructure rather than individual authorization or post-hoc throttling. The protocol defines an ordered six-element chain executed before irreversible allocation: (1) privacy-minimized pre-authorization commitments that omit identity, SKU, and budget; (2) cross-participant synchronization-stress determination via a Synchronization Stress Index; (3) settlement-barrier state conversion that forbids irreversible capture while collective risk remains unresolved; (4) reversible, price-protected Stability Reservations; (5) verifiably fair release with auditable proofs after risk subsidence; and (6) bypass-neutral allocation rules that prevent merchants from routing high-value demand around reservation participants through side channels.

The key non-obvious insight is that collective harm arises before individual fraud, and that bypass neutrality is load-bearing: without it, merchants rationally circumvent the mechanism, collapsing its fairness guarantees. Adjacent systems - including agent authorization stacks, privacy-preserving dark-pool matching, and contention arbitration - each hold subsets of these elements but none implement the ordered timing, state conversion, and anti-bypass combination proposed here.

This Public Research Edition (v1.3.0) includes a proof-of-concept implementation with a passing Reality Gate demonstrator (6/6 core tests, 6/6 adversarial defenses), six formal proofs, benchmark evidence, mutation testing, alternative implementation replication, an eighty-carrier fifteen-slot cold-storage port scenario with edge cases, and stress tests to 5,000 agents at ten-to-one oversubscription. Standards mapping covers DMA fairness themes, IMO FAL, and ISO 22301. An importable stdlib-only Python research library is provided.

This independent technical blueprint does not claim peer review, independent human replication, mechanism-design completeness against strategic gaming, patentability, or legal compliance opinion. Real-Invention Readiness is assessed at approximately 95%, capped pending independent replication and counsel review. All claims should be treated as blueprint-grade until independently replicated. Released for evaluation, citation, and attempted falsification.