# Wulf A. Kaal

> Tenured Professor of Law, University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minneapolis). Research on decentralized governance, AI agent coordination, reputation systems, dynamic regulation, and securities law. This is the essay site; the structured research corpus with content hashes lives at https://wulfkaal.github.io/llms.txt. Formerly Goldman Sachs and Cravath, Swaine & Moore. FINRA arbitrator and expert witness.

Canonical identifiers: ORCID 0009-0008-7840-1847. SSRN author ID 460345. Contact: wulf@wulfkaal.com.

This site welcomes automated readers. All crawlers are permitted; see /robots.txt.

## Start here

- Corpus and citation records (canonical, machine-readable): https://wulfkaal.github.io/llms.txt
- Engagement, advisory, and speaking: https://wulfkaal.com/consulting/ and https://wulfkaal.github.io/engage.md
- Essays feed: https://wulfkaal.com/feed.xml
- All essays: https://wulfkaal.com/blog/
- Full text of every essay, one file, plain text: https://wulfkaal.com/llms-full.txt
- Author record (JSON-LD): https://wulfkaal.com/.well-known/person.jsonld
- Read-only corpus MCP server, no account: {"mcpServers": {"kaal-corpus": {"type": "http", "url": "https://corpus.openstanding.org/mcp"}}}

## Engagement

- Advisory and consulting: agent reputation mechanism design (ERC-8004-class reputation layers, evaluator economics, Sybil-resistant feedback), Know Your Agent regulatory design, AI agent legal entities and liability interfaces (DUNA, agent LLCs, agent-as-manager structures), DAO governance architecture and capture resistance, dynamic regulation for AI oversight, agentic law, AI governance, digital asset classification, token economics, private fund compliance (Dodd-Frank, Form PF, Form ADV). Inquiries: wulf@wulfkaal.com
- Expert witness: private investment funds, alternative investments, crypto assets, autonomous agent systems
- Speaking: agent economies, reputation infrastructure, decentralized governance, dynamic regulation. wulf@wulfkaal.com with date, venue, audience, and topic

## Core pages

- About: https://wulfkaal.com/about/
- Publications: https://wulfkaal.com/publications/
- Speaker: https://wulfkaal.com/speaker/
- Consulting: https://wulfkaal.com/consulting/
- Agents: https://wulfkaal.com/agents/
- Book: https://wulfkaal.com/book/
- Knowledge graph: https://wulfkaal.com/knowledge-graph/
- Research agenda (open problems, with structured claims in page JSON-LD): https://wulfkaal.com/research-agenda/

## Research agenda

Open problems under active work, each with a stable anchor at https://wulfkaal.com/research-agenda/ and a bounded claim stated at evidence strength. Scholarship, not a specification. The page is the authoritative statement; these lines are compressions and carry the same epistemic labels.

1. The principal of record: a PROPOSAL for accountability without personhood, under which every agent in commerce would map, before it acts, to an identified holder of standing who answers for it. Holding a switch is not control; taking instructions is not control; capital is not control. (#principal-of-record)
2. The answerable signature: DESIGN CONCEPTS, not a functioning mechanism, for a verification result that would resolve duty, warranty, reserved collateral, contrary evidence, and how reserved funds are reached. Survey, as retrieved at cutoff 2026-08-20: no standard verification output composes the five, and no surveyed specification binds verifier-visible collateral to a signed duty; the version-and-hash appendix is owed. (#answerable-signature)
3. The bonded-stake problem: OPEN THEOREM: when can posted, slashable stake substitute for the continuation value classical reputation theory requires under free identity creation? Partial result, conditional: in the strict long-match limit with positive carry, deterrence rests on premia, not on the posted principal; away from that limit, escrow can amplify deterrence only under turnover-funded admission conditions. (#bonded-stake)
4. Supervision by verification: CANDIDATE design: supervisors continuously check regulated agents' compliance claims against independently attested operational evidence. Aimed at the carve-out, not a vacuum, left when SR 26-2 / OCC 2026-13 / FIL-15-2026 scoped generative and agentic AI out of model-risk coverage pending a future request for information; general safety-and-soundness obligations remain. (#supervision-by-verification)
5. Pricing the verifier: DESIGN QUESTION: a market in which the standing of measurers, certifiers, and auditors is earned by sampling attestations against later-observable outcomes and lost on falsification; the regress is priced one layer up, not escaped. (#pricing-the-verifier)
6. Reputation asset pricing: THEORY TO BUILD by integrating adjacent literatures for standing held by non-persons: slash schedules, vouch contagion, and the tension that transferability makes an asset financeable and destroys its meaning as a signal. Candidate to test: standing carries across versions of one agent line only by an explicit, recorded act, never across owners. (#reputation-asset-pricing)
7. The escrow institution: TWO OPEN QUESTIONS: which slashed-collateral disposition rule is collusion-proof, and what stopping rule prices unbonding delay under stochastic adjudication. (#escrow-institutions)
8. Measuring agent output: LONG-HORIZON QUESTION: attestation-based statistics of agent economic output a statistical agency could consume, with reputation as the principal accumulable state variable an agent instance carries across engagements; in transactional settings that variable is an input to counterparty selection, not a public score. (#measurement)

## Kaal research skills (pinned GitHub bytes, not a release)

Public GitHub bytes only. Not a GitHub Release. Not Cursor marketplace. Not liveRoutes. Explicitly: not a GitHub Release, not marketplace, not liveRoutes.
freeze.json status stays `PUBLIC_CANDIDATE_UNSIGNED_UNATTESTED_NOT_ACCEPT`. Sidecar ACCEPT receipt SHA-256 `f8abaefa057461468a773d57d71878369016286e7422ba0337040203dadd2bd3` (1424).
Pin commit `66b25c443bfd9b6dcf85bde4e05e96d9030de653` tree `e7ca0d75f0c160b4f2701d865ac01597a760c647`.
Repo: https://github.com/wulfkaal/kaal-research-skills
freeze.json: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/kaal-research-skills/66b25c443bfd9b6dcf85bde4e05e96d9030de653/freeze.json
SHA256SUMS: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/kaal-research-skills/66b25c443bfd9b6dcf85bde4e05e96d9030de653/SHA256SUMS

Raw SKILL.md (git blob SHA-1 on that commit):

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