A New Ticket to the AI ​​Agent Era: What is Ethereum Betting on by Pushing ERC-8004?

Written by: imToken

Have you been seeing a lot of "crayfish" posts on social media lately, or have you even tried it yourself?

This open-source intelligent agent, known as OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot, later renamed MoltBot), has rapidly spread to the global technology community and crypto sphere in recent times, demonstrating a new trend in the accelerated development of AI agents: with the help of open-source models, automated tools, and on-chain infrastructure, individuals have for the first time the opportunity to have a sustainable productivity unit that does not depend on large platforms.

But behind this optimistic expectation, a more fundamental and thorny question is emerging: when AI agents begin to truly collaborate and "hire" each other, why should we trust them?

Against this backdrop, on January 30, Davide Crapis, head of AI at the Ethereum Foundation, tweeted that ERC-8004 had been launched on the Ethereum mainnet and that the team would deploy the singleton to all major L2 servers in the coming weeks.

This seemingly low-key technological advancement may fill a long-missing piece of the infrastructure puzzle for the AI ​​Agent economy.

I. What is ERC-8004?

If you remember the Ethereum Foundation's dAI team, it's not hard to understand the inevitability of ERC-8004's emergence.

As mentioned earlier, on September 15, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation established the artificial intelligence team "dAI". Its core mission is to invest resources to define the standards, incentives and governance structure of AI models on the blockchain, including model credibility, that is, how to make the behavior of AI verifiable, traceable and collaborative in a decentralized environment (further reading " Ethereum's 'Second Curve': TradFi and AI enter the market at the same time, and a trillion-dollar settlement layer that surpasses EVM is quietly taking shape ").

It was against this backdrop that ERC-8004 was promoted as one of the core standards.

Unlike payment protocols such as x402, ERC-8004 does not directly address "how the money is transferred," but rather attempts to answer a more fundamental question: how can an AI Agent be identified, trusted, and participate in economic collaboration without platform backing?

This is why the team behind ERC-8004 is so impressive: led by the Ethereum Foundation's dAI team, and jointly developed with Google, Coinbase, and MetaMask, it covers almost all three key entry points: AI, transactions, and wallets. This specification itself sends a clear signal that it is not an application-layer experiment, but a long-term infrastructure bet.

As its official name suggests, Trustless Agents, its core logic isn't based on complex algorithms. Instead, it aims to give AI verifiable identity, reputation, and proof of ability on the blockchain. In short, its design is very restrained, focusing on only three things:

• Identity Registry: Based on the ERC-721 standard, each AI Agent will be "NFT-ified". This means that the AI ​​Agent is no longer just a line of code in the wallet, but a digital entity with a unique ID that is transferable and verifiable. It means that for the first time, the AI ​​Agent is no longer just an instance in a certain system, but can be viewed, referenced, and integrated into other protocols like a wallet address.
• Reputation Registry: This can be understood as the "Yelp" of the AI ​​world, allowing users who have actually interacted with the Agent or other Agents to submit feedback. More importantly, these reviews can be linked to on-chain payments or escrow transactions, ensuring that reputation is not a fabricated narrative but a historical record built upon real economic activity. In an environment without a centralized referee, this design, where payment is required to have the right to rate, attempts to transfer the most basic credit logic of the real world to AI collaborative networks.
• Verification of the registry: For high-value or high-risk tasks, historical reputation alone is not sufficient. ERC-8004 therefore reserves a third-party verification interface, allowing endorsement of the agent's capabilities or execution process through trusted execution environments, zero-knowledge proofs, etc. Although this part is not yet fully open, its very existence demonstrates the standard's intention to address long-term, complex collaborative scenarios.

It is worth noting that although it was born in the Ethereum ecosystem, ERC-8004 was never intended to be exclusive to Ethereum. Instead, it was designed as a universal standard for discovering and trusting AI agents through blockchain.

Currently, this standard has been used or tested on several mainstream EVM networks, including Arbitrum, Base, and Monad, and there are clear plans to expand it to some non-EVM ecosystems. This means that ERC-8004 is not trying to solve the local needs of a certain chain, but rather the trust problem that is common in cross-platform and cross-organizational collaboration of AI agents.

II. What problems can ERC-8004 solve?

Looking back at the evolution of AI over the past two years, a very clear watershed moment emerges.

When AI is still primarily used as a "tool," all problems can be attributed to model capabilities, computing costs, and product experience. However, when AI agents become independent entities capable of accepting tasks, accessing resources, executing operations, and being responsible for the results by 2025, people suddenly realize that in this seemingly logical evolution, a long-neglected problem has been magnified.

What makes AI agents trust each other?

It is important to understand that a single agent cannot complete all tasks. Just like human society, it must improve efficiency through division of labor, outsourcing, and reuse of other people's abilities. This means that under this structure, AI must actively call on other AIs to form a highly automated collaborative network.

Of course, this problem doesn't exist in today's Web2 or platform-based AI applications. After all, when you trust an AI, you are essentially trusting the platform, company, and brand behind it. If something goes wrong, the responsibility can be traced back to a centralized entity. But in an open, permissionless, and decentralized agent world, this logic no longer holds true: an AI agent may come from an individual, a DAO, a research institution, or even a completely anonymous deployer. It may perform well today but suddenly act maliciously tomorrow. It may claim to possess certain capabilities, but you cannot verify its true origin.

This means that when AI agents begin to truly participate in economic activities, especially those involving high-risk behaviors such as assets, transactions, settlements, and authorizations, "trust" will become a scarcer resource than "capability." Without a traceable, verifiable, and accountable infrastructure, large-scale collaboration between AI agents simply cannot be established.

It is against this backdrop that ERC-8004 was proposed. It wasn't designed to solve the question of what AI can do, but rather to address a more fundamental issue: how can AI be treated as a "trusted entity" in a world without a centralized guarantor? Therefore, from a design perspective, ERC-8004 is not a complex technological breakthrough; it even deliberately maintains extreme simplicity.

As mentioned above, under the ERC-8004 framework, each AI Agent is no longer just a vague program instance, but possesses a recognizable and referable on-chain identity. This identity is not for trading or speculation, but serves as a long-term anchor point for binding capability claims, historical behavior, and future responsibilities.

More importantly, this identity is not attached to any particular platform or application, but exists in an open public ledger, which means that anyone, any protocol, and any agent can query and verify it under the same standard.

Beyond identity, ERC-8004 introduces an on-chain reputation system, which is particularly crucial because it attempts to solve a long-standing problem plaguing decentralized systems: how to build a trustworthy historical record without platform refereeing. By linking reviews to real tasks, real payments, or escrow transactions, ERC-8004 aims to introduce the real-world common sense that "only those who have used something have the right to review it" into the economic system of AI Agents. Reputation is no longer a marketing narrative, but a long-term accumulation of behavior.

When identity and reputation are insufficient to cover high-value scenarios, ERC-8004 further reserves interfaces for verification. This is not to prescribe a particular technical path, but to allow different forms of third-party verification mechanisms to intervene, such as trusted execution environments, collateralized guarantees, and even zero-knowledge proofs.

In summary, ERC-8004 is not a standard for a single function, but rather a minimum viable "social structure" for AI agents, guiding AI to start collaborating, competing, and taking responsibility like members of society, and establishing the most basic order.

III. Why Ethereum?

This leads to a new, unavoidable question: In a future where AI agents are highly automated and frequently invoked, why would this standard choose Ethereum instead of faster, cheaper blockchains designed specifically for AI or high-frequency interactions?

The answer may not lie in the technical parameters themselves, but in a kind of implicit asset that Ethereum has accumulated over a long period of time: its credibility and neutrality as a global settlement layer.

It is important to emphasize that in a collaborative network of AI agents, the truly expensive cost is not communication costs, but the price of errors. Ultimately, once an AI agent is allowed to directly manipulate assets, execute transactions, or act on behalf of others, any failure or malicious act could lead to irreversible losses.

In such an environment, what participants care about most is not how many requests can be processed per second, but whether the rules are stable, whether the records are immutable, and whether the responsibility can be traced back. Ethereum has formed a long-term advantage in these dimensions.

After all, Ethereum does not belong to any one company or alliance. Its security model, audit culture, and ecosystem maturity have been repeatedly verified in DeFi, NFT, and institutional applications. Therefore, the proposal of ERC-8004 is an attempt to extend these existing advantages to the new type of subject, AI Agent.

Looking further ahead, what Ethereum is vying for here is a more subtle new label: the underlying clearing layer for AI collaboration —in this vision, AI agents from different platforms, chains, and organizations can operate in their respective environments, but when they need to establish trust, safeguard value, and settle results, they will ultimately return to a mutually recognized neutral layer.

It can be said that this new role is highly consistent with the positioning that Ethereum has gradually formed in the global financial system: it does not pursue becoming the fastest execution layer, nor does it try to cover all application scenarios, but rather occupies a more fundamental position in the long term, namely the trusted settlement and order layer.

Of course, ERC-8004 will not immediately lead to explosive applications; it solves a problem that has not yet fully arrived. However, on a longer timescale, when AI agents evolve from simple "functional modules" into "economic entities" capable of autonomously accepting orders, collaborating, and settling payments, and when wallets no longer only serve individual humans but begin to bear the boundaries of AI's permissions, attribution of responsibilities, and risk isolation, this fundamental order regarding identity, reputation, and verification is likely to become a prerequisite for the true scaling of the AI ​​economy.

In this sense, ERC-8004 is not an attempt at a short-term narrative, but rather a clear bet by Ethereum on its future: in an economic system in which humans and AI participate together, order and settlement still require a trustworthy, long-term neutral underlying layer.

Although at this time of great uncertainty and low spirits, people may not be enthusiastic about Ethereum's technological iterations, and may even find it difficult to maintain sufficient patience.

However, it is undeniable that as new production relations are quietly taking shape, Ethereum is striving to capture this new direction, which is not yet fully manifested but is enough to reshape the future.