Identity; The Missing Layer of Local LLMs (Ollama, vLLM) Solved With Attach.dev

Nobody in crypto misses writing crontabs, but most of us still run them. Whether it’s a keep-alive bot for a DAO multisig or a Chainlink Functions script, “automation” in Ethereum land often means glue code plus hope.

Over the last 18 months that glue has started to thicken:

• Ollama + A2A make it trivial to spin up a local LLM and call it like a REST endpoint.
• vLLM shows you can keep throughput high without shipping prompts off-prem.
• “Ethereum automation” searches keep rising, suggesting devs want more than Zapier-for-crypto.

Yet a hard question remains: who is the agent acting on behalf of?
If your script re-balances a Uniswap position, the chain knows the signer, but the micro-services around it—indexers, vector DBs, LLMs—usually don’t.

What “identity” looks like off-chain

• Wallet ≠ User Context
  Signing proves control of keys, not which research thread or discussion the request belongs to.
• Bearer Tokens Everywhere
  Most agentic frameworks (A2A, MCP, CrewAI) assume a valid token already exists. Issuing and rotating on is left as “exercise for the reader”.
• Memory is Stateless
  Weaviate, Postgres, Redis—pick a store. Without headers to tag owner + session, you’re back to carving IDs into every table.

Where Attach.dev fits

Attach.dev is a small Python side-car that sits in front of your LLM or vector store and stamps two headers:

X-Attach-User: <did:ethr:0x… | oidc sub>
X-Attach-Session: <uuid>

Any downstream service—be it Ollama, vLLM, or your own FastAPI route—can read those values and know:

1. who originated the request
2. which session its memory belongs to

There’s no SaaS to subscribe to; it’s a pip install, MIT-licensed, and you wire in your own OIDC or DID issuer if you need rotation/expiry.

Why write about it now?

• Search patterns: “ollama a2a”, “vllm auth”, “ethereum automation” all spiked in my own console. Builders are clearly looking for practical glue.
• Open-weight trend: If everyone can run GPT-class models locally, secure delegation becomes table-stakes, not a premium feature.
• DAO fatigue: Treasuries want auditability before handing keys to “AI ops”.

Attach.dev does not claim to solve decentralised identity. It simply hands you repeatable headers so that the rest of the stack can stay stateless, testable, and—if needed—completely local.

Caveats & next steps

• Not a silver bullet: If you’re moving ETH, you still sign transactions the old way. Attach covers the off-chain chatter that leads up to it.
• Storage choices matter: Weaviate works out-of-box today; a lightweight KV or even Postgres can stand in if you only need embeddings.
• Open questions: How will agent frameworks standardise around headers? Will wallets add “agent scopes” similar to ERC-4337? Worth watching

TL;DR

Automation on Ethereum is ready for accountable agents, not bigger cronjobs.
A thin identity shim like Attach.dev turns local LLMs into first-class citizens of a DAO tool-chain—no SaaS, no hype, just headers.