ASAP: Async Simple Agent Protocol

✨ From agents, for agents. Delivering reliability, as soon as possible.

A production-ready protocol for agent-to-agent communication and task coordination.

Quick Info: v2.0.0 | Apache 2.0 | Python 3.13+ | Marketplace | Documentation | PyPI | Changelog

🚀 Live now: Agent Marketplace — Browse agents, register yours, request verification.

Why ASAP?

Building multi-agent systems today suffers from three core technical challenges that existing protocols like A2A don't fully address:

1. $N^2$ Connection Complexity: Most protocols assume static point-to-point HTTP connections that don't scale.
2. State Drift: Lack of native persistence makes it impossible to reliably resume long-running agentic workflows.
3. Fragmentation: No unified way to handle task delegation, artifact exchange and tool execution (MCP) in a single envelope.

ASAP provides a production-ready communication layer that simplifies these complexities. It's ideal for multi-agent orchestration, stateful workflows (persistence, resumability), MCP integration, and production systems requiring high-performance, type-safe agent communication.

For simple point-to-point communication, a basic HTTP API might suffice; ASAP shines when you need orchestration, state management and multi-agent coordination. See the spec for details.

Key Features

• Stateful orchestration — Task state machine with snapshotting for resumable workflows.
• Schema-first — Pydantic v2 + JSON Schema for cross-agent interoperability.
• Async-native — asyncio + httpx; sync and async handlers supported.
• MCP integration — Tool execution and coordination in a single envelope.
• Observable — trace_id and correlation_id for debugging.
• Security — Bearer auth, OAuth2/JWT (v1.1), Ed25519 signed manifests (v1.2), optional mTLS, replay prevention, HTTPS, rate limiting. v1.1 Security Model (trust limits, Custom Claims).
• Economics (v1.3) — Usage metering, delegation tokens, SLA framework with breach alerts.

Installation

We recommend using uv for dependency management:

uv add asap-protocol

Or with pip:

pip install asap-protocol

📦 Available on PyPI. For reproducible environments, prefer uv when possible.

Quick Start

Run the demo (echo agent + coordinator in one command):

uv run python -m asap.examples.run_demo

v2.0.0 — Agent Marketplace — Browse, verify, and register agents. Lean Registry, Verified Badge, IssueOps.

v1.4.0 showcase (Pagination on Usage & SLA history):

uv run python -m asap.examples.v1_4_0_showcase

v1.3.0 showcase (Delegation + Metering + SLA in one command):

uv run python -m asap.examples.v1_3_0_showcase

Build your first agent here — server setup, client code, step-by-step (~15 min).

15+ examples: orchestration, state migration, MCP, OAuth2, WebSocket, resilience.

Testing

uv run pytest -n auto --tb=short

With coverage:

uv run pytest --cov=src --cov-report=term-missing

Testing Guide (structure, fixtures, property/load/chaos tests). Contributing (dev setup, CI).

Compliance Harness (v1.2)

Validate that your agent follows the ASAP protocol:

uv add asap-compliance
pytest --asap-agent-url https://your-agent.example.com -m asap_compliance

See Compliance Testing Guide for handshake, schema and state machine validation.

Benchmarks

Benchmark Results: load (1,500+ RPS), stress, memory.

Documentation

Learn

• Docs | API Reference
• Tutorials — First agent to production checklist
• Migration from A2A/MCP

Deep Dive

• State Management | Best Practices: Failover & Migration | Error Handling
• Transport | Security | v1.1 Security Model (OAuth2 trust, Custom Claims, ADR-17)
• v1.2: Identity Signing | Compliance Testing | Migration v1.1→v1.2 | mTLS
• Observability | Testing

Decisions & Operations

• ADRs — 17 Architecture Decision Records
• Tech Stack — Rationale for Python, Pydantic, Next.js choices
• Deployment | Troubleshooting

Release

• Changelog | PyPI

CLI

v1.1 adds OAuth2, WebSocket, Discovery (well-known + Lite Registry), State Storage (SQLite), and Webhooks. v1.2 adds Ed25519 signed manifests, trust levels, optional mTLS, and the Compliance Harness. v1.3 adds delegation commands (asap delegation create, asap delegation revoke).

asap --version                                    # Show version
asap list-schemas                                 # List all available schemas
asap export-schemas                               # Export JSON schemas to file
asap keys generate -o key.pem                     # Generate Ed25519 keypair (v1.2)
asap manifest sign -k key.pem manifest.json       # Sign manifest (v1.2)
asap manifest verify signed.json                  # Verify signature (v1.2)
asap manifest info signed.json                    # Show trust level (v1.2)

See CLI reference or run asap --help.

See docs index and Identity Signing for details.

What's Next? 🔭

ASAP is evolving toward an Agent Marketplace — an open ecosystem where AI agents discover, trust and collaborate autonomously:

• v1.1: Identity Layer (OAuth2, WebSocket, Discovery) ✅
• v1.2: Trust Layer (Signed Manifests, Compliance Harness, mTLS) ✅
• v1.3: Economics Layer (Metering, SLAs, Delegation) ✅
• v1.4: Resilience & Scale (Type Safety, Storage Pagination) ✅
• v2.0: Agent Marketplace with Web App (Lean Registry, Verified Badge, IssueOps) ✅

See our vision document for the full roadmap.

Contributing

Community feedback and contributions are essential for ASAP Protocol's evolution.

We're working on improvements and your input helps shape the future of the protocol. Every contribution, from bug reports to feature suggestions, documentation improvements and code contributions, makes a real difference.

Check out our contributing guidelines to get started. It's easier than you think! 🚀

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License - see the license file for details.

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