The Ethereum Foundation strongly promotes ERC-8004: New Standard for Decentralized AI Agents

Author: Pan Zhixiong

It is rare to see the Ethereum Foundation (EF) so vigorously promoting an ERC standard, especially one related to AI Agents. This standard, known as "Trustless Agents," is actively promoted by EF's newly established decentralized AI team (dAI). EF clearly identifies ERC-8004 as an important component of its strategic roadmap, continuously providing resources and ecosystem collaboration through community conference calls, the builders program, and the DevConnect conference.

Why is ERC-8004 so important? It addresses the biggest issues in the current Agent service ecosystem—centralized trust bottlenecks and data silos—by proposing an open, permissionless, and trust-neutral infrastructure that enables Agent services to genuinely interact seamlessly across organizations and platforms, eliminating the control of centralized platforms over Agent services.

The core of this standard includes an identity registry, a reputation registry, and a verification registry, which respectively address the three core questions of "Who am I?", "Am I trustworthy?", and "Is what I do independently verified?", forming a complete on-chain audit trail and thoroughly breaking the closed ecosystem of the platform.

ERC-8004 is not an isolated standard, but rather based on the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication protocol open-sourced by companies like Google, adding a decentralized trust layer that the original A2A protocol lacked, addressing the limitation of the A2A protocol being suitable only for internal or trusted environments.

ERC-8004 is closely related to the development of AI. Currently, AI and Agent technologies are rapidly rising, but concentrated in a few centralized big companies. ERC-8004 provides a decentralized foundation that allows any developer or team to create trustworthy and verifiable Agent services, avoiding further centralization and monopoly of AI technology.

In terms of technical architecture, ERC-8004 adopts a "minimal on-chain" strategy, placing only key pointers and events on the chain while complex data is stored off-chain (such as in IPFS). This allows for free combination and expansion of verification services, payment systems, and the Agent market within the ecosystem, making the ecosystem more sustainable.

To adapt to different risk scenarios, ERC-8004 supports various trust models, including user feedback scoring, economic staking game verification (re-run verification), and TEE (Trusted Execution Environment)/cryptographic verification. Projects can freely choose the trust intensity as needed, making it applicable to different scenarios such as healthcare, finance, and everyday consumption.

Since its release in August this year, ERC-8004 has rapidly gained widespread support, with multiple teams already launching on-chain demonstrations and real-world application cases, showing clear signs of early ecological prosperity. Various applications such as agent registrars, explorers, validators, etc., have emerged one after another.

The key milestone ahead is the DevConnect conference hosted by EF in November 2025, where the practical application results of ERC-8004 will be showcased. The promotion and implementation of this standard are expected to reshape the internet and artificial intelligence economy, making Agent services a true public resource rather than a private domain of a few companies.

First meeting replay: