Ethereum Foundation Promotes ERC-8004 Standard for Decentralized AI Agents

According to PANews, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is actively promoting a new ERC standard related to AI agents, known as 'Trustless Agents.' This initiative is led by EF's newly established decentralized AI team (dAI), which has identified ERC-8004 as a strategic priority. The foundation is providing resources and fostering ecosystem collaboration through community calls, builders programs, and the DevConnect conference. ERC-8004 addresses significant issues in the current agent service ecosystem, such as centralized trust bottlenecks and data silos. It offers an open, permissionless, and trust-neutral infrastructure that enables seamless interaction across organizations and platforms, eliminating centralized control over agent services. The standard includes identity, reputation, and verification registries, addressing core questions of identity, trustworthiness, and independent verification. This creates a comprehensive on-chain audit trail, breaking the closed ecosystem of platforms. ERC-8004 builds on open-source Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication protocols from companies like Google, adding a decentralized trust layer to overcome the limitations of A2A protocols, which are typically confined to internal or trusted environments. The development of ERC-8004 is closely linked to AI advancements. As AI and agent technologies rapidly emerge, often concentrated within a few centralized companies, ERC-8004 provides a decentralized foundation for developers and teams to create trustworthy and verifiable agent services, preventing further centralization of AI technology. Technically, ERC-8004 employs a 'minimal on-chain' strategy, placing only key pointers and events on the blockchain while storing complex data off-chain, such as on IPFS. This allows for flexible combinations and expansions of verification services, payment systems, and agent markets, enhancing ecosystem sustainability. ERC-8004 supports various trust models to accommodate different risk scenarios, including user feedback ratings, economic stake verification (re-run verification), and TEE/cryptographic verification. Projects can choose the appropriate trust level for diverse applications, such as healthcare, finance, and everyday consumer scenarios. Since its release in August, ERC-8004 has gained widespread support, with multiple teams showcasing on-chain demonstrations and real-world applications, indicating early signs of ecosystem prosperity. Various agent registries, explorers, and verifiers are emerging. The next significant milestone is the DevConnect conference in November 2025, where EF will showcase practical applications of ERC-8004. The promotion and implementation of this standard could reshape the internet and AI economy, transforming agent services into public resources rather than private domains of a few companies.