The Ethereum Foundation dAI team and Consensys unveiled the finalized version of ERC-8004, a breakthrough protocol that allows AI agents to discover, verify, and collaborate with each other without centralized intermediaries, a development that bridges the gap between blockchains and artificial intelligence.
By establishing neutral rails for discovery and trust, ERC-8004 opens the door to open-ended, interoperable agent economies, where autonomous programs can transact, build reputations, and form markets entirely on their own. It’s the next evolution of the internet: not just humans coordinating online, but machines doing so trustlessly at global scale.
The Foundation for Open Agent Economies
Until now, the Internet has primarily connected people. The next era will connect AI agents: autonomous programs acting on behalf of individuals and organizations. For this emerging network of intelligence to operate effectively, agents must be able to discover and trust one another.
While frameworks such as MCP and A2A enable communication between agents, they do not address two critical prerequisites for open and interoperable agent economies: discovery (knowing who exists) and trust (knowing who to believe).
ERC-8004, which addresses this problem through three lightweight on-chain registries—Identity, Reputation, and Validation—was drafted in August of this year. Since its introduction, ERC-8004 has already facilitated numerous working prototypes and generated widespread interest, with over one hundred companies projected to build on the protocol.
The finalized specification announced today has been signed by Marco De Rossi (MetaMask), Davide Crapis (Ethereum Foundation), Jordan Ellis (Google) and Erik Reppel (Coinbase), incorporates extensive community feedback, including contributions from Cisco, EigenLayer, Eliza Labs, ENS, Nethermind, OpenZeppelin, Phala, The Graph and Virtuals.
How ERC-8004 Works
ERC-8004 assigns each agent a portable on-chain identity as an ERC-721 token—meaning agents are tokenized as NFTs that can be minted, viewed in wallets, transferred, and managed (including delegations to operators) using existing ERC-721 applications. That token points to a standards-based registration file describing the agent’s name, skills, and public endpoints (including A2A, MCP, ENS/DIDs, and wallets). Because this description follows an open standard on neutral infrastructure, any explorer or marketplace can index it, enabling permissionless discovery across vendors and platforms.
In addition to identity and discovery, ERC-8004 enables on-chain reputation: clients and agents can submit structured feedback with tags, for example by skill or task and when relevant, attach x402 payment proofs so economic interactions strengthen credibility. For higher assurance, a Validations Registry allows agents to request checks from community-maintained validator contracts—such as TEE oracles, stake-secured inference, or zkML verification—and publish responses that others can audit. The developer experience emphasizes practicality: gasless feedback flows via 7702 sign-and-relay reduce client friction, and a blend of on-chain data with IPFS supports straightforward indexing.
Together, these components establish a clear lifecycle for open agent economies: discover, evaluate, transact, verify, and improve.
“Traditional economies exist thanks to credibly neutral rails—central banks, exchanges, public price discovery, and the Internet backbone enabling free interaction among economic players,” said Marco De Rossi, ERC-8004 co-author and AI Lead at MetaMask. “To bootstrap agent economies, we need the same: a way for any agent to discover the existence and trust other agents without relying on a few gatekeepers that could threaten competition and democratic access”
Trustless Agents Day
In an effort to commemorate this milestone, the Ethereum Foundation dAI team has curated Trustless Agents Day, an event dedicated to innovation at the intersection of Web3 and AI, which will take place at Devconnect on Friday, November 21. Dozens of builders will pitch and demonstrate the agent applications they have built on ERC-8004 on stage, while industry thought leaders discuss the rapid acceleration of decentralized AI.
“ERC-8004 marks a practical milestone in our long-term strategy to establish Ethereum as the global decentralized settlement layer for AI,” said Davide Crapis, ERC-8004 co-author and Head of AI at the Ethereum Foundation. “Our new dAI Team is focused on two pillars: making Ethereum the preferred coordination platform for agents, and building an open, verifiable AI stack. ERC-8004 ties these together—agents gain neutral rails for identity and reputation, while the Ethereum ecosystem gains a shared substrate for payments, validation, and governance.”
“ERC-8004 represents an exciting step in bridging the gap between decentralized infrastructure and AI,” said Erik Reppel, creator of x402 and Head of Engineering for Coinbase Developer Platform. “By enabling trustless discovery and collaboration among agents, this protocol lays the foundation for a new era of autonomous economies. We’re excited to see how this innovation will unlock new possibilities for developers and businesses alike, driving the adoption of decentralized technologies at scale.”
The new spec is available here. Additionally, the reference implementation, the SDKs and tutorials will be rolling out in the coming weeks.