What is ERC-8004 and how does it work?

ERC-8004 is a proposed Ethereum standard, titled Trustless Agents, for giving AI agents and other automated services a public identity and track record on a blockchain. It aims to let one agent discover another and decide whether to trust it without the two sides knowing each other first. It does not handle payments itself, but it is designed to work alongside payment protocols.

What is the ERC-8004 trustless agents standard?

The proposal page on eips.ethereum.org lists four authors and a creation date of August 13, 2025. It is a Standards Track ERC in Draft status, which means details can still change. It builds on existing standards, including the NFT standard ERC-721 and the typed signature standard EIP-712.

The authors say existing agent protocols such as MCP and A2A handle how agents talk to each other but not how they find each other or establish trust. ERC-8004 is meant to fill that gap by linking an onchain record to those agents' service endpoints.

How does AI agent identity on Ethereum work?

The Identity Registry is an ERC-721 contract, so each agent is a token. Its token ID is the agent's ID, and the token owner controls the agent entry and can transfer it. Our ERC-721 guide explains the token type.

Each token points to a registration file in JSON, which can live on IPFS, a website or fully onchain. The file lists the agent's name, description, service endpoints and whether it accepts x402 payments. QuickNode notes that registering is an ordinary transaction that costs gas, and that deployments use the same contract addresses on each chain. Polygon's docs list registry addresses beginning with 0x8004 on its network.

What is the ERC-8004 reputation registry?

The Reputation Registry gives clients a shared format for leaving feedback on an agent. Each entry stores a numeric score and optional tags onchain, with fuller details kept offchain. Anyone can then build their own scoring on top of the raw feedback.

The proposal admits a weak spot. Fake agents and fake reviewers can try to inflate scores, a Sybil attack. Its answer is to keep all signals public in one format so reputation services can filter by who left the feedback.

What does the validation registry do?

The Validation Registry lets an agent ask an independent validator to check its work and lets the validator post the result onchain. The standard supports several trust models, scaled to the value at stake. These include re-running work backed by staked funds, zero-knowledge proofs of machine learning output and attestations from secure hardware.

As for deployment, crypto.news reported on January 28, 2026, that a mainnet rollout was expected the next day. Growthepie later said the standard launched in late January 2026 and counted more than a million registrations by February 17. QuickNode lists deployments on Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Avalanche and Mantle. The proposal still notes that it cannot guarantee an agent's advertised abilities work or are safe.