Ethereum's ERC-8004 Standard Enables AI Agents to Interact Without Gatekeepers

Ethereum AI Agent Standard ERC-8004 Launches This Week

An Ethereum smart contract standard enabling trustless artificial intelligence agent communication on the network is "probably" going to be deployed on mainnet on Thursday, according to Marco De Rossi, head of AI at MetaMask. Further development of ERC-8004 has been "frozen [...] and we will go to mainnet midweek, probably around Thursday, 9 AM ET," said De Rossi on a Telegram channel for developers of the protocol on Monday. On Tuesday, the official Ethereum X account said the protocol is going live on mainnet "soon." "By enabling discovery and portable reputation, ERC-8004 allows AI agents to interact across organizations, ensuring credibility travels everywhere," it explained. The Ethereum Request for Comment proposes a standard way to register and validate AI agents. Developers can implement it in their smart contracts, and it does not require any changes to the Ethereum network itself. The proposal explains that the protocol is designed for discovering, choosing, and interacting with agentic AI across organizational boundaries without pre-existing trust, enabling open agent economies on blockchain. Agentic AI economy coming to Ethereum The standard solves two core problems: how to find AI agents and how to know which agents are reliable. While protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Agent2Agent handle agent communication, skills advertising, and task orchestration, they don't address discovery or trust. "To foster an open, cross-organizational agent economy, we need mechanisms for discovering and trusting agents in untrusted settings." "Ethereum is in the unique position to be the platform that secures and settles AI-to-AI interactions," said AI lead at the Ethereum Foundation, Davide Crapis, on Tuesday. AI services can interoperate without gatekeepers The standard will also work on the Ethereum layer-2 Base, according to developers on Telegram, but they did not provide a time frame for deployment. Base uses x402, an open payment protocol developed by Coinbase and introduced in May 2025, which enables instant, automatic stablecoin payments directly over HTTP, empowering AI agents to pay for services autonomously. The launch of ERC-8004 provides the missing piece that lets AI agents become economic actors rather than just isolated, siloed tools. "This unlocks a global market where AI services can interoperate without gatekeepers," stated the Ethereum account on X.

ERC-8004 'Agents' Standard Nears Mainnet as Ethereum Teases Rollout

Ethereum is teasing ERC-8004. Here's what it means and why it matters. | Credit: CCN. * Ethereum's official X account said ERC-8004 is going live on mainnet "soon," promoting it as a way to help AI agents discover each other. * MetaMask AI lead Marco De Rossi said development is "frozen" and a mainnet deployment is "probably" midweek, citing Thursday around 9 a.m. ET as a target window. * ERC-8004 is a draft application-layer standard, not an Ethereum protocol upgrade. Ethereum is signaling a near-term rollout of ERC-8004 , a draft standard that proposes a shared framework for AI agents to prove identity claims, accumulate reputation, and request validation using the network as a neutral reference layer. In a Jan. 27 post on X, the blockchain's official account said "ERC-8004 is going live on mainnet soon," framing the standard as a way to enable agent discovery and portable credibility across platforms without centralized intermediaries. ERC-8004 Nears Mainnet, But It Isn't A Network Upgrade ERC-8004 is not an Ethereum hard fork, and it does not change Ethereum's consensus rules. It is a standards-track ERC, meaning it defines application-layer interfaces and data formats that developers can implement in smart contracts and tooling. That makes the phrase "going live on mainnet" easy to misunderstand. In practice, a "mainnet launch" typically means: * the ERC-8004 registry contracts are deployed to Ethereum mainnet, * addresses are published for developers to integrate, * indexers and explorers begin tracking agent identities and trust signals. On the ERC-8004 page, the proposal is labeled Draft and Standards Track: ERC, with a created date of 2025-08-13. The author list includes Marco De Rossi and Davide Crapis, alongside contributors with Google and Coinbase email addresses shown in the document metadata. The proposal also lists required standards: EIP-155 (chain identifiers), EIP-712 (typed signatures), EIP-721 (NFT-style identities), and EIP-1271 (smart contract signature verification). Community signals suggest the rollout could happen as early as Thursday, Jan. 29, but confirmation will come from on-chain deployments. The Ethereum Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment. What ERC-8004 Actually Standardizes ERC-8004 aims to standardize a basic "trust layer" for agents, especially for scenarios where agents interact across different companies and ecosystems. The proposal defines three lightweight on-chain registries: identity, reputation, and validation. Identity: Agents as ERC-721 IDs The identity component treats agents as ERC-721 identities, where each agent is represented by a token ID in a registry. Metadata is pointed to via an "agentURI," which can describe services, endpoints, and capabilities off-chain. This design makes agents indexable in familiar Ethereum tooling. It also makes identity portable in a way that works across apps. Reputation: Portable Feedback, With Spam Risks The reputation layer standardizes how clients can publish feedback about an agent and how others can query it. That portability is the point: a reputation signal should be reusable across marketplaces and platforms. The trade-off is predictable. If anyone can post feedback, then reputation becomes vulnerable to low-quality inputs and Sybil activity. The proposal explicitly warns that consumers should filter reputation sources rather than treating raw signals as authoritative. Validation: A Hook for "Proof the Work Happened" The third layer, validation, is meant for cases where "reputation" is not enough. It defines a way for agents to request validation and receive responses from validators, which could represent many approaches, from crypto-economic checks to cryptographic attestations. ERC-8004 does not mandate a single validation method. It standardizes the interface so different validation markets can plug in. Why This Matters Now AI agents are moving from experiments to systems that touch real-world value: payments, data access, and automated decision-making. Designers built most trust models for humans. They assume slow-moving identity, institutional accountability, and legible intent. Agent-to-agent interaction breaks those assumptions. It scales faster, routes around organizational boundaries, and often operates through APIs and wallets rather than contracts and signatures on paper. ERC-8004's bet is that Ethereum can act as a neutral coordination layer for this shift. It offers a shared format for identity and trust signals while leaving most compute and interaction off-chain. Supporters have framed this as an expansion of Ethereum's role beyond finance and toward infrastructure for interoperable AI services.