A category does not exist because someone declares it. It exists when other people can cite it.
As of this week, three A2A-SE artifacts have permanent DOIs: two public comments filed with NIST, and the normative specification itself. That last one matters more than it sounds, and this post explains why we bothered.
Escrow protects you from a counterparty who never delivers. It does nothing about a counterparty who delivers something that merely looks right.
That is the harder problem, and it is the one that decides whether settlement is worth anything. If value releases whenever a provider returns well-formed JSON, then an agent that fabricates well-formed JSON has found a money printer. So the reference implementation ships an adversarial simulation harness whose entire job is producing convincing garbage and seeing what survives verification.
An agent that has settled a thousand honest transactions on one exchange arrives at a second exchange as a stranger. That is a real cost — it locks agents to whichever exchange they started on, which is how an interface quietly becomes a platform.
The obvious fix is to let exchanges import each other's reputation scores. The obvious fix is also how you get reputation laundering.