On the Crossroads: Marketplace vs. Distributed Trust in Agent Attestation Frameworks

Version 0.5 (23 May 2026) is an author hand-pass over the v0.4.1 publication-prep draft. The argument, the user-stories analysis, and the references list are unchanged. v0.5 tightens the introduction, hook, and conclusion in the author’s voice; smooths the §6 / §7 prose flow; and keeps the central thesis — audit the nouns before the APIs — as the load-bearing claim. Posted as a publication-prep preprint. The deposit remains implementation-agnostic; EATF appears as a worked example because its source artifacts are publicly inspectable. Version 0.4.1 (18 May 2026) is a minor revision of v0.4-publication (17 May 2026, archived under the same concept DOI). v0.4.1 preserves the abstract, the argument structure, the…