The New Ticket to the AI Agent Era: Pushing ERC-8004, What is Ethereum Betting On?

Have you recently been flooded with posts about "Little Lobster," or have you already jumped in to try it out?

This open-source agent, known as OpenClaw (originally Clawdbot, later renamed MoltBot), has rapidly spread across global tech communities and crypto circles in the past period, showcasing a new trend in the accelerated formation of AI Agents: leveraging open-source models, automation tools, and on-chain infrastructure, individuals now have the first opportunity to own a sustainable, productive unit that doesn't rely on large platforms.

Yet, precisely behind this optimistic outlook, a more fundamental and thornier issue is emerging: when AI Agents truly start collaborating and "hiring" each other, how can we trust them?

Against this backdrop, on January 30th, Davide Crapis, the AI Lead at the Ethereum Foundation, tweeted that ERC-8004 is now live on the Ethereum mainnet, and the team will deploy the singleton to all major L2s within the next few weeks.

This seemingly low-key technical advancement might just fill a long-missing piece of infrastructure for the AI Agent economy.

1. What is ERC-8004?

If you recall 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 dedicate resources to defining standards, incentives, and governance structures for AI models on the blockchain, including model trustworthiness—essentially, how to make AI behavior verifiable, traceable, and collaborative in a decentralized environment.

ERC-8004 was advanced as one of the core standards in this context.

Unlike payment protocols such as x402, ERC-8004 does not directly solve "how money is transferred." Instead, it attempts to answer a more fundamental question: In the absence of platform endorsement, how can AI Agents be identified, trusted, and participate in economic collaboration?

This is precisely why the driving force behind ERC-8004 is particularly impressive: led by the Ethereum Foundation's dAI team and jointly developed with Google, Coinbase, and MetaMask, it almost encompasses the three key entry points of AI, trading, and wallets. This level of involvement itself signals that it is not merely an application-layer experiment but a clear, long-term infrastructure bet.

As its official name, Trustless Agents, suggests, its core logic is not complex algorithms but aims to give AI verifiable on-chain identity, reputation, and capability proofs. To put it simply, its design is very restrained, focusing on only three things:

• Identity Registry: Based on the ERC-721 standard, each AI Agent is "NFT-ified." This means an AI Agent in a wallet is no longer just a line of code but a digital entity with a unique ID, transferable and verifiable. It signifies that for the first time, an AI Agent is not just an instance within a system but can be looked up, referenced, and integrated into other protocols like a wallet address.
• Reputation Registry: Think of it as a "Yelp for AI," allowing users or other Agents who have actually interacted with an Agent to submit feedback. More importantly, these reviews can be linked to on-chain payments or escrow behaviors, ensuring reputation is not a narrative generated out of thin air but a historical record built upon real economic activities. In an environment without a centralized referee, this design—where you can only review after paying—attempts to migrate the most basic credit logic from the real world into AI collaboration networks.
• Verification Registry: For high-value or high-risk tasks, historical reputation alone is insufficient. Therefore, ERC-8004 reserves interfaces for third-party verification, allowing endorsements of an Agent's capabilities or execution processes through methods like trusted execution environments or zero-knowledge proofs. Although this part is not yet fully open, its very existence indicates the standard's intent for long-term, complex collaboration scenarios.

It's worth noting that although born within the Ethereum ecosystem, ERC-8004's goal from the start was not to be Ethereum-exclusive. On the contrary, it was designed as a universal standard for AI Agent discovery and trust via blockchain.

Currently, the standard is already in use or being tested on multiple mainstream EVM networks, including Arbitrum, Base, Monad, etc., with clear plans to expand to some non-EVM ecosystems. This means ERC-8004 is attempting to solve not a localized need of a particular chain but the universal trust problem that exists when AI Agents collaborate across platforms and organizations.

2. What Problems Can ERC-8004 Solve?

Looking back at AI's evolution over the past two years reveals a very clear watershed.

In the phase where AI primarily existed as a "tool," all problems could be attributed to model capability, computational cost, and product experience. But when AI Agents in 2025 became independent entities capable of taking on tasks, calling resources, executing operations, and being responsible for outcomes, everyone suddenly realized that in this seemingly logical progression, a long-overlooked problem was magnified infinitely.

How can AI Agents trust each other?

It's important to understand that a single Agent cannot complete all tasks. Like human society, efficiency must be improved through division of labor, outsourcing, and reusing others' capabilities. This means that within this structure, AI must actively call upon other AIs, forming a highly automated collaboration network.

Of course, in today's Web2 or platform-based AI applications, this problem doesn't exist. After all, trusting an AI essentially means trusting the platform, company, and brand behind it. If something goes wrong, responsibility can be traced back to a centralized entity. But in an open, permissionless, decentralized world of Agents, this logic no longer holds: An AI Agent might come from an individual, a DAO, a research institution, or even a completely anonymous deployer. It might perform well today but turn malicious tomorrow. It might claim to have certain capabilities, but you cannot verify their true origin.

This means that when AI Agents truly start participating in economic activities, especially those involving high-risk behaviors like asset management, trading, settlement, and authorization, "trust" will become a scarcer resource than "capability." Without a set of infrastructure that is queryable, verifiable, and accountable, large-scale collaboration between AI Agents simply cannot exist.

It is precisely in this context that ERC-8004 was proposed. It is not meant to solve what AI can do but directly addresses a more foundational proposition: in a world without centralized guarantors, how can AI be treated as a "trustworthy entity." Therefore, from a design philosophy 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 an identifiable, referenceable 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 responsibility.

More importantly, this identity is not attached to any specific platform or application but exists on an open public ledger. This means anyone, any protocol, any Agent can query and verify it under the same standard.

Building upon identity, ERC-8004 introduces an on-chain reputation system. This point is particularly crucial because it attempts to solve a long-standing problem plaguing decentralized systems: how to build credible historical records without a platform referee. By binding evaluations to real tasks, real payments, or escrow behaviors, ERC-8004 hopes to introduce the real-world common sense of "you can only review if you've used it" into the economic system of AI Agents. Reputation is no longer marketing narrative but the long-term accumulation of behavior.

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

Overall, ERC-8004 is not a single-function standard but is constructing a minimal viable "social structure" for AI Agents, guiding them to start collaborating, competing, and taking responsibility like members of society, establishing the most basic order.

3. Why Ethereum?

This leads to a new, unavoidable question: in a future where AI Agents are highly automated and frequently interact, why would this standard choose Ethereum over blockchains that are faster, cheaper, and specifically designed for AI or high-frequency interactions?

The answer might not lie in technical parameters themselves but in a type of implicit asset Ethereum has long accumulated: its credibility and neutrality as a global settlement layer.

It must be emphasized that in AI Agent collaboration networks, the truly expensive cost is not communication but the price of error. Ultimately, once AI Agents are allowed to directly operate assets, execute transactions, or act on behalf of others, any single failure or malicious act could lead to irreversible losses.

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

After all, Ethereum does not belong to any single company or alliance. Its security model, audit culture, and ecosystem maturity have been repeatedly validated in DeFi, NFTs, and institutional-grade applications. Therefore, the proposal of ERC-8004 is precisely an attempt to extend these existing advantages to this new type of entity: the AI Agent.

Looking further, what Ethereum is competing for here is a more subtle new label: the underlying clearing layer for AI collaboration. In this vision, AI Agents from different platforms, different chains, and different organizations can operate in their respective environments. But when they need to establish trust, escrow value, or settle outcomes, they ultimately return to a commonly recognized neutral layer.

It can be said that this new role aligns perfectly with the positioning Ethereum has gradually formed in the global financial system: it does not seek to be the fastest execution layer, nor does it try to encompass all application scenarios. Instead, it occupies a more foundational position long-term: a trusted settlement and order layer.

Of course, ERC-8004 will not immediately trigger explosive applications. It solves a problem that hasn't fully arrived yet. But from a longer time scale, when AI Agents evolve from mere "functional modules" to "economic entities" capable of autonomously taking orders, collaborating, and settling, and when wallets no longer serve only human individuals but start to carry the permission boundaries, responsibility attribution, and risk isolation for AI, this foundational order concerning identity, reputation, and verification will likely become a prerequisite for the true scaling of the AI economy.

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

Although at this current time of roaring bear markets and low sentiment, people might not be enthusiastic about Ethereum's technical iterations and may find it hard to maintain sufficient patience.

But it is undeniable that as new production relations quietly take shape, Ethereum is striving to capture this new direction—one that hasn't fully materialized yet but is powerful enough to reshape the future.