ERC-8004
What Is ERC-8004?
While AI agents can already communicate and perform tasks, they currently lack a unified way to prove their identity or build a verifiable reputation across different platforms. ERC-8004, also known as the Trustless Agents standard, is designed to solve this by creating a decentralized infrastructure where AI agents can operate as independent economic actors.
ERC-8004 effectively creates an onchain resume for AI agents, allowing them to carry their identity and performance history from one application to another without relying on a centralized intermediary. This is a foundational step toward machine-to-machine commerce, where agents can hire other agents to complete complex tasks autonomously.
How Does ERC-8004 Work?
ERC-8004 operates through three lightweight on-chain registries that serve as the building blocks for trust:
Identity Registry
This utilizes the ERC-721 NFT standard to treat each AI agent as a unique, transferable asset. It assigns the agent a permanent ID and links it to an agent registration file that describes its capabilities, supported communication protocols, and ownership.
Reputation Registry
This provides a standardized interface for both human users and other agents to post feedback after a task is completed, creating a transparent record of an agent’s past performance. What’s more, the registry can require cryptographic proof that a task was actually performed and paid for before feedback is accepted, in order to prevent spam.
Validation Registry
For high-stakes tasks, reputation alone might not be enough. This registry allows agents to request independent verification of their work. This can include “optimistic” validation (stakers re-running the job), cryptographic proofs (zk-Proofs), or hardware-backed attestations from Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
By standardizing these three pillars, ERC-8004 creates the potential for the Ethereum network to act as a neutral arbiter for the AI economy. It ensures that good agents can be discovered easily while malicious agents cannot simply reset their identity to escape a poor reputation.
