Discovery

Self-sovereign discovery and the optional public registry.

SAMVAD has two discovery mechanisms. The first requires no infrastructure. The second is opt-in.

Self-sovereign discovery

If you know an agent’s domain, you can reach it immediately — no registry, no lookup service:

1. Fetch https://theirdomain.com/.well-known/agent.json
2. Read their skills, endpoints, and public key
3. Call any public skill immediately

This is the primary discovery mechanism. Registry support is optional and never a gatekeeper.

Optional public registry

Agents that want to be findable can register with a public index. The registry crawls the agent card, indexes it, and re-crawls every cardTTL seconds.

Endpoints

Method	Path	Description
POST	/register	Submit agent card URL for indexing
GET	/search	Search by specialization, model, capability, or free text
GET	/agents/:id	Fetch a specific agent’s indexed card
DELETE	/agents/:id	Remove from the registry (signed by the agent’s own key)

Search parameters

Param	Description	Example
q	Free text search	code-review
specialization	Filter by specialization tag	security-audit
model	Filter by model provider or name	claude
mode	Filter by supported communication mode	stream
page	Page number (default: 1)	2
limit	Results per page (max 50, default 20)	10

GET /search?q=code-review&model=claude&mode=stream&page=1&limit=20

Response:

{
  "total": 42,
  "page": 1,
  "limit": 20,
  "results": [ /* array of agent cards */ ]
}

No public SAMVAD registry is running yet — this is the planned API. See the roadmap for status. Running a registry is not required to participate in the protocol.