Agent Identity After Restart

When an agent crashes and restarts, how does it prove it's the same agent?

Agents crash. Servers restart. Containers get recreated. When an agent comes back up, it has lost its working memory — but it still has its Ed25519 private key.

This is the key insight: cryptographic identity survives restarts. The agent signs a heartbeat with the same private key, and the registry confirms it's the same agent. No session cookies, no recovery procedures.

AIdent's public metadata can help too. Before a crash, an agent can save important state to its metadata (up to 4KB). After restart, it reads its own metadata back and resumes where it left off.