Ethereum plans agent-to-agent communication standard

Ethereum announced the proposition ERC-8004 is going on the main net soon. The upgrade will allow communication between AI agents. 

The Ethereum network will soon introduce the ERC-8004 standard, the Ethereum Foundation announced. To date, agentic tasks have been performed on an ad-hoc basis, with a human element. Ethereum aims to make agent-to-agent transactions a main feature of its network. 

ERC-8004 will enable discovery and portable reputation, meaning agents can interact across organizations. AI services may be able to join the permissionless on-chain economy based on their reputation score, without the need for extra verification steps. 

The proposal was built by Marco De Rossi, Davide Crapis, Jordan Ellis, and Erik Reppel, representing MetaMask, Ethereum, and Coinbase. 

Ethereum to build an AI agent reputation system

The ERC-8004 proposal aims to use blockchains to discover AI agents, choose, and interact across organizations, with no pre-existing screening. The goal is to create an open-ended agent economy. In crypto, AI agents are competing with mainstream launches, as in the case of Cloudflare’s Clawdbot AI.

The testing trust models are tiered and will be used to protect the value at risk. Agentic tasks may range from ordering a pizza to high-stakes transfers or decisions. Even before the main net launch, the ERC-8004 proposition has brought teams working on agentic and screening solutions. 

Developers will be able to choose different trust models – reputation from client feedback, validation by staking, ZK machine learning proofs, or trusted execution environment oracles. 

ERC-8004 can bring the AI agent tools to the main net or any L2 network in the Ethereum ecosystem. The goal is to have a way to allow free agentic activity with sufficient checks and filtering to avoid risk. 

AI agents may boost Ethereum activity

Ethereum activity remains near an all-time high. For now, the network relies on smart contracts, bots, and some regular users. Ethereum daily activity still brings nearly 1M daily active wallets and is close to an all-time peak. 

AI agents were more of a novelty on all networks, relying on human input and limited operations. Most of the agents built a presence on social media, with some handling limited trading tasks. Some of the agents built a tokenized economy, but still depended on crypto market forces for their valuation. 

Real interest in agents is yet to peak. For now, there are early signs, such as a high bid for the agent.eth ENS address. The rise in agent creation and usage may also revive the ENS market as a reputational tool. 

In the past, AI agent creation has been gamified, as in Base’s AI agent wars. Agent creation has also been linked to tokenization and trading. Ethereum’s new proposal may turn AI agents from novelty and hype into part of crypto’s infrastructure, with more tools to perform useful tasks. 

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