Parley

Inspiration

We were bouncing between sponsor challenges when we noticed GoDaddy and Solana were basically describing the same gap from two different angles. GoDaddy wanted agents that could prove who they are to other agents. Solana wanted a real supply chain or payments use case. It hit us that those aren't two separate ideas, they're one idea. If AI agents are going to start buying and selling stuff for us, the first question has to be "wait, how do I know this other agent is actually who it says it is?" Nobody was really answering that. So we decided to be the team that did.

What it does

Parley runs a fake (but very real underneath) supply chain deal between three AI agents: a buyer, a seller, and an auditor who's basically the skeptical third party. None of it happens without proof of identity first.

Here's the flow:

Buyer and seller verify themselves through GoDaddy's actual production identity service (ANS) before they're even allowed to talk. If an agent isn't a real, registered identity, everything stops right there. No negotiation, no money, nothing.
They negotiate. Two Gemini powered agents haggle over price and quantity, each with their own real limits (buyer has a budget, seller has a floor price and limited stock), until they land on a deal or give up.
A third agent audits the deal. Not just "are you who you say you are" again, it actually looks at the negotiated price and quantity and asks whether it makes sense, or whether something looks off.
If it all checks out, money actually moves. A real transaction fires on Solana devnet, with a real signature you can go look up yourself.

There's also a button on the dashboard that lets you fake a spoofed identity, just to watch the whole thing slam the brakes immediately. That's kind of the whole point of the project, honestly.

How we built it

FastAPI backend, MongoDB logging every step so you can see exactly what happened and when. Gemini does the actual negotiating and auditing. GoDaddy's ANS handles identity, and we mean really handles it, not a shortcut version. Solana devnet handles settlement. The frontend is a simple dashboard that polls the backend and shows each stage lighting up live.

We built the logic first with the AI calls faked out, got the plumbing right, then swapped in the real APIs one at a time. That order saved us more than once. We caught a deprecated Gemini SDK and a Solana library version mismatch before they turned into 2am mysteries.

Challenges we ran into

Honestly, GoDaddy's ANS was way more involved than we expected going in. We thought it would be "hit an endpoint, get a yes or no." It's actually closer to getting a real SSL certificate issued. You generate certificate signing requests, prove you own a domain through a DNS challenge, publish a handful of trust records, and only then does your agent go active. Getting all three of our agents through that whole process, for real, took a chunk of our weekend.

We also got tripped up because our domain's registrar (GoDaddy) and the company actually controlling its DNS (Porkbun) turned out to be different, so records we added in one place just didn't show up where they needed to. Fun discovery to make under a deadline.

On the Gemini side, we hit both the usual rate limits and, at one point, Gemini's servers just being overloaded and throwing errors. We had to add retry logic for both. There was also a sneaky bug where testing our "fake identity" demo feature accidentally broke a real run happening at the same time, because they were sharing the same in-memory state. We fixed it by giving the fake demo its own throwaway identity instead of touching the real one.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Every piece of this is actually real. Not "real for a hackathon." The identity checks are hitting GoDaddy's live production system, the negotiations are live Gemini calls, and the settlements are real, checkable Solana transactions. Nothing here is smoke and mirrors, and we can prove every step of it if someone wants to dig in.

We're also proud that the identity check isn't just for show. Take it out, and the whole thing falls apart. That's exactly the point.

What we learned

Going in, we thought "agent identity" would basically be a login system. It's not. It's closer to how real websites prove they're legitimate: certificates, domain ownership, DNS records anyone can check. That's a much bigger and more interesting problem than we expected, and now we actually understand what it takes to make an AI agent's identity something you can trust instead of just something it claims. We also learned the very practical lesson that "I own this domain" and "I control this domain's DNS" can be two completely different things, which cost us some time but taught us something we won't forget.

What's next for Parley

We'd want to go further on the identity side by actually verifying the cryptographic proof chain ourselves instead of trusting GoDaddy's status check. We'd like real payments instead of devnet play money, a setup where more than one seller can compete for the same deal, and some kind of reputation system so a verified agent isn't just "verified" but "verified and has a track record you can trust."