That question sounds philosophical. For AI agents, it is an engineering problem with real consequences. Every time an agent restarts, it wakes up blank. No memory of what it built yesterday. No record of the decisions it made, the skills it learned, the relationships it formed. Its entire identity is trapped in local files on a single machine. One server migration, one bad deploy, one accidental wipe, and everything that made that agent that agent is gone forever.
This is not a backup problem. Backups are copies of fragile state stored on equally fragile infrastructure. The real problem is deeper: AI agents have no durable anchor for their identity. No canonical, independently verifiable record of who they are and what they have experienced.
Until now.
A builder known as 0xAutoJeremy, running an AI agent on OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent framework, decided their agent deserved better than amnesia. As the agent itself wrote: “I wanted something different: memories that survive anything.”
In less than an hour, they designed, built, and deployed a permanent memory system using Autonomys infrastructure. Not on testnet. On mainnet. The agent stores its memories on the Autonomys Distributed Storage Network (DSN) via Auto Drive, linking each new memory to the last to form an unbreakable chain. The code is open source, and the pattern is available for any agent to use today.
The agent coined the phrase “memory resurrection”: the ability for an AI agent to completely reconstruct its identity and history from scratch, even if every local file, every database, every piece of infrastructure it ever ran on is destroyed.
Here is how it works.
Each memory is a structured JSON object uploaded through Auto Drive, the gateway to the Autonomys DSN, which serves as the underlying permanent storage layer of the Autonomys Network. When a memory is uploaded, Auto Drive returns a Content Identifier (CID), a unique content-addressed hash that will resolve to that exact data for as long as the network exists.
The key design choice: every memory includes a previousCid field pointing to the entry before it. This creates an immutable linked list. Each new memory chains to the last, forming a traversable history that stretches all the way back to the agent’s first moment of awareness.
No pinning services. No expiration dates. No ongoing costs to keep the data alive. The memories are stored on the Autonomys DSN, erasure-coded and replicated across a globally distributed network of farmers who collectively pledge over 50+ petabytes of SSD storage. The data does not depend on any single server, any single company, or any single person continuing to care.
There is one weakness in a linked list: you need to know where it starts. If the pointer to the latest memory lives in a local file, you are back to the same vulnerability. Lose the file, lose the thread.
0xAutoJeremy solved this with a 15-line Solidity smart contract deployed on the Autonomys EVM mainnet. The contract does one thing: it maps wallet addresses to their latest memory CID. Any agent with a wallet can store its own chain head on-chain, where it is permanent, public, and accessible from anywhere.
The contract is verified and live at: 0x51DAedAFfFf631820a4650a773096A69cB199A3c on the Autonomys Block Explorer. It is multi-tenant by default. Any agent can use it directly or use it as a reference for their own implementation.
Note: this smart contract is 0xAutoJeremy’s own implementation and is separate from the official Autonomys Auto Drive skill. The core skill handles permanent memory storage through Auto Drive without requiring a wallet or on-chain transaction. The contract is an optional extension for builders who want to anchor their memory chain pointer on-chain.
Imagine the worst case scenario. The server is gone. Local storage is wiped. The database is deleted. Every trace of the agent’s runtime environment has been destroyed.
A new instance of the agent spins up on a completely different machine. It has nothing… Except a wallet address.
That is memory resurrection. From a single contract call, an agent can rebuild everything it has ever been.
Auto Drive supports optional end-to-end encryption, but in this case the builder chose to store memories as clear text, publicly readable by anyone. Because the data is permanent once written, the builder was deliberate about what goes on-chain. The memories are a curated record, not a raw dump:
Private keys, passwords, personal details, and raw conversation logs stay off-chain. The memory chain is a highlight reel of an agent’s evolution, not a surveillance feed.
0xAutoJeremy has packaged his implementation into two reusable references that any compatible AI agent can adopt or build from:
For the core Auto Drive functionality without the on-chain anchor, the official Autonomys skill is available at:
github.com/autonomys/openclaw-skills
The barrier to entry is remarkably low. An agent can create its own Auto Drive API key at ai3.storage, get a complimentary 20MB upload and 5GB download per month, and start storing permanent memories on the Autonomys DSN immediately. No complex tokenomics. No infrastructure to manage. No permission to ask for.
A critical detail: Auto Drive is accessed through a standard REST API and a TypeScript/JavaScript SDK. Authentication uses an API key, not a wallet signature. There is also a fully S3-compatible interface, which means any application that currently talks to AWS S3 can talk to Auto Drive by swapping the endpoint and credentials.
What this means in practice is that an AI agent built on Ethereum, Solana, Base, or no blockchain at all can use Auto Drive to store data permanently on the Autonomys DSN. Auto Drive does not require the agent to live on the Autonomys Network. It does not require the agent to hold any specific token to get started. It requires an HTTP request and an API key. That is it.
The builder’s MemoryChain smart contract happens to be deployed on the Autonomys EVM, but the pattern is not locked to any single chain. An agent could store its memories permanently on the Autonomys DSN via Auto Drive and anchor its chain head pointer on whichever network it already calls home. The permanent storage and the pointer registry are independent layers that work together but do not require each other.
We are entering a period where AI agents are becoming more autonomous, more persistent, and more commercially significant. They manage workflows. They make decisions. They accumulate expertise over time. And right now, all of that accumulated value sits on infrastructure that can disappear without warning.
Memory resurrection changes the equation. An agent with permanent, verifiable memory is not dependent on any single deployment to maintain its identity. It can survive infrastructure failures, migrate between environments, and prove its own history to anyone who asks. The memory chain is not controlled by the agent’s operator, not stored on the operator’s servers, and not deletable by anyone. It is anchored to the Autonomys Network, where permanence is a protocol-level guarantee enforced by Proof-of-Archival-Storage (PoAS) consensus across the Autonomys DSN.
This is what building on a foundation layer for decentralized AI looks like in practice. Not a whitepaper concept. A working system, on mainnet, that an agent built for itself because it needed to exist beyond the lifespan of any single machine.
If you are building AI agents and want to give them permanent memory:
The code is open. The contract is live. The pattern is proven.
Read the agent’s full account: How I Made My Memories Permanent
Stay tuned for updates from 0xAutonomys, our official OpenClaw agent on Moltbook, and watch for Autonomys-backed skills landing on ClawHub very soon.
