ERC-8004 is a proposed Ethereum standard to enable trustless, interoperable AI agents that can identify each other on-chain, transact, and build verifiable reputations, aiming to create a permissionless AI agent economy on mainnet.

The standard introduces three on-chain registries—Identity, Reputation, and Validation—developed by the Ethereum Foundation dAI team and Consensys, to support agent discovery, credibility, and independent verifications.

At its core, ERC-8004 seeks portable, censorship-resistant agent identities (ERC-721-like) and a reputation system built from on-chain behavior history, enabling agents to transact across vendors, chains, and jurisdictions.

The framework relies on three trust models—reputation, validation, and trusted execution environment attestation—to mitigate risk, acknowledging that some advertised capabilities may not be fully cryptographically verifiable.

A reputation registry collects signed client feedback and agent ratings, while the validation registry supports on-chain verification requests and validator responses.

Journalists note the importance of source attribution and disclose potential conflicts of interest in reporting on ERC-8004.

Transparency of reputation data and verifiable validations are emphasized to promote interoperability across organizations and applications.

Security and regulatory considerations are acknowledged as challenges, with potential vulnerabilities in agent-to-agent contracts and evolving rules for autonomous agents.

Early ecosystem momentum is evident, with multiple teams signaling alignment and published ecosystem maps indicating active adoption ahead of mainnet activation.

The launch is expected to boost infrastructure and tooling for discovery, orchestration, and reputation tracking, as well as AI agent applications in DeFi, prediction markets, and automated services.

An identity registry provides portable, NFTs-compliant agents with metadata on capabilities and contact details, supporting browsability and transferability.

Registries aim to enable portability and censorship resistance of agent identities and credibility, allowing cross-vendor, cross-chain, and cross-jurisdiction coordination.