Today's agents are pinned to whoever ships them. Switch the model provider, the runtime, or the wrapper app, and the agent's identity quietly resets — its history, reputation, and the trust users placed in it do not travel with it.
Cleon Protocol treats a persona as a first-class object. The persona is minted as an ERC-721, points to a canonical schema payload stored on IPFS, and is hash-anchored on Base. The on-chain reference is the durable identity; the runtime is interchangeable.
This separation matters because the parts of an agent that earn trust — its track record, the skills it has been composed with, the attestations attached to its executions — are exactly the parts users should be able to take with them across the surfaces they use it on.
In practice, that means the same persona can be launched from a chat app, a developer console, or a wallet integration without forking its identity. The runtime resolves persona and skills, validates signatures, and returns an execution record that points back at the persona it served.
None of this requires the token. Minting a persona, publishing a skill, calling an agent, and contributing to governance are all token-free. $CLEON sits on top as a coordination layer — the protocol works without it, which is the point.