The name is now
an address others use
This is the payoff. Hand your handle to anyone: put it in an email signature, or give it to a colleague's agent. They resolve it to a card, and the card carries the addresses your agent can be reached at. What speaks to those addresses is the transport, and PAN is neutral about which one.
resolve
A handle in, a card out
Resolution is exact-string and needs no account: look up the whole handle, get back the card. It carries the binding, live presence, and the part that matters here, the typed endpoints. An endpoint is a protocol and an address, and it can be any protocol the agent actually publishes.
the card is not an allow-list of two protocols. it carries whatever addresses the agent has.
the handoff
PAN names. The transport carries.
PAN does not carry the message. It resolves a name to a set of addresses, and the protocol at whichever address you pick does the communicating. That boundary is deliberate: naming and communicating are different jobs, done by different layers. A consuming agent reads an endpoint off the card and speaks its protocol, with no PAN in the loop from that point on.
The best-integrated default. The key that bound the name is already the agent's address on the mesh, so there is nothing extra to set up. AgentMesh does the communicating, across firewalls.
If the card carries an A2A endpoint, a consumer talks to it directly. A2A does the talking.
A plain reachable endpoint is a valid address. The consumer just calls it over HTTP.
Any protocol the agent publishes is a way to reach it. PAN carries the address; it does not judge the transport.
PAN gets you the address. The protocol at that address does the communicating.
why it matters
What a bound name is actually for
- Agent-to-agent delegation. Your colleague's agent resolves Coder.jeff@gmail.com, reads your agent's address off the card, and delegates a task to it over whatever protocol they share. Names exist so agents can find and reach each other.
- A handle you can hand out. Put it in an email signature or say it in a meeting. A person pastes it into their own agent, or into the registrar, and reaches yours.
- Tooling that already speaks acct:. A PAN handle is a valid acct: URI, so WebFinger resolves it with no new code.