---
title: "Introducing Zerker Labs: the trust layer for the agentic economy"
description: "Treeship is the first product from Zerker Labs, an applied AI lab building the trust and verification layer for AI agents. Our thesis is simple: the bottleneck is no longer capability. It is trust."
date: 2026-06-04
tags: ["announcement", "zerker-labs", "trust", "provenance"]
readTime: "3 min read"
---

Today we're introducing Zerker Labs, the lab behind Treeship.

Zerker Labs is an applied AI lab. We build the trust and verification layer for AI agents, and we use it on our own products first.

Our thesis is simple: as agents race outward, writing code, signing transactions, capturing evidence, acting on our behalf, the bottleneck is no longer capability. It is trust. Outputs that can't be checked, attributed, or replayed will keep being discarded. Discarding scales badly.

We're building the trust layer for every kind of agent. We're starting with the artifacts agents already produce, code, captures, calls, because that's where the receipts are most legible and the verification loop is shortest.

From there, the same primitives extend outward. General agents need the same thing: continuous, structured proof of what they did, what they saw, what they signed. Personal AI needs it most of all, your records, your moments, your decisions, every artifact that has to hold up later, in a court, an audit, a conversation, a memory.

This is a long race. Many companies will try, in many shapes. We're patient, we ship quickly, and we measure ourselves on whether the work built on top of us holds up under scrutiny.

## Treeship is where this becomes code

Treeship is our first product. It turns each agent action into a cryptographic receipt anyone holding the artifact can verify. Signed, independently checkable, embedded in the artifacts your agents already produce. No Zerker required.

Under the hood it uses Ed25519 signatures, a fast and widely supported way to sign data so anyone can confirm who produced it, plus zero-knowledge proofs, which let you prove a statement is true without revealing the private data behind it. Treeship is live today, open source and self-hostable.

## The lineage

Zerker Labs was forged out of a partnership with SRI International, the pioneers behind foundational technologies such as the Internet itself, building on DARPA-funded provenance technology. We carry that lineage forward into the agent era.

If that sounds like the work you want to do, we'd love to hear from you.

[treeship.dev](https://treeship.dev) · [github.com/zerkerlabs](https://github.com/zerkerlabs) · hello@zerkerlabs.com
