Original: Deep Tide TechFlow

On January 28, Ethereum’s official announcement said the ERC-8004 protocol is about to launch on the mainnet.

We mentioned this standard in an article we published last October. If you don’t understand it at all, you can refer here: 《x402 逐渐内卷，提前挖掘 ERC-8004 里的新资产机会》

It actually has a formal name: “Trustless Agents”—trustless agents. Put into plain English, it’s roughly:

Issue an on-chain ID to AI Agents.

The Ethereum Foundation rarely pushes an ERC standard this hard. They specifically set up a team called dAI, included ERC-8004 in their 2026 strategic roadmap, and pulled in Google, Coinbase, and MetaMask to co-draft the proposal. In November, they even held a Trustless Agents Day at DevConnect to drum up momentum.

The last time Ethereum promoted standards with this much seriousness was ERC-20 and ERC-721.

One defines tokens, one defines NFTs.

Now it’s AI’s turn?

Ethereum’s AI anxiety

Why the rush?

Look at some data. According to Cookie.fun’s statistics on the market-cap distribution of AI Agent tokens, Solana and Base together take 96%. The number of AI Agent projects on the Ethereum mainnet that are recognizable by name can be counted on one hand.

The number of AI Agent projects on the Ethereum mainnet that are recognizable by name can be counted on one hand.

In April 2025, the ETH-to-BTC exchange rate fell to 0.017, a five-year low. Back then, everyone said Ethereum isn’t the future.

When DeFi was hot, Ethereum was the home turf. When NFTs were hot, Ethereum was also the home turf. Once AI Agents heated up, the home turf changed hands.

Solana processes 36 million transactions per day, while Ethereum mainnet processes 1.13 million. With high gas fees and slow speed, developers vote with their feet. When Virtuals Protocol launched on Base, earlier ai16z had already chosen Solana—and even Coinbase’s own AI project didn’t get placed on the Ethereum mainnet.

Ethereum needs a new story.

ERC-8004 might be the start of that story.

Revisiting ERC-8004

Let’s get back to the standard itself.

So how exactly does ERC-8004 work—the thing about issuing an on-chain ID to AI Agents?

You don’t need to understand any technical details. You just need to know there are three ledgers.

The first is the identity ledger. Built on ERC-721, each AI Agent mints an NFT to prove “I am me.”

The second is the reputation ledger. It records the agent’s historical performance—who has used it, how they rated it, and whether it has done any bad acts.

The third is the verification ledger. It lets third-party institutions stamp and vouch for the agent—such as “this agent passed a certain security audit.”

With these three “notebooks” combined, it solves one problem: when two AI Agents meet on-chain, how do you know whether the other party is trustworthy?

Previously, the answer was: you don’t know—you can only rely on people. The answer of ERC-8004 is: check the on-chain records.

This isn’t something Ethereum invented on its own.

Its underlying logic comes from Google’s A2A protocol they released last year—Agent-to-Agent—enabling AI to communicate and call each other. On top of that, ERC-8004 adds another layer:

Trust backed by the blockchain.

Google’s A2A solves the communication problem; Ethereum’s ERC-8004 solves the trust problem. One handles the talking, one verifies the identity.

Is issuing an ID a good business?

Let’s speculate—Ethereum’s logic might be like this:

For an AI Agent to truly be useful, it has to be able to manage money itself. Not posting on Twitter, not chatting, but directly operating on-chain assets. Signing transactions, interacting with contracts, cross-protocol arbitrage…

Right now, nobody dares to do this at scale. The reason is simple: how do you know this Agent won’t transfer your money away? The ClawdBot that’s gone viral these days already has community users posting related negative incidents.

Web2’s solution is platform endorsement. If you use OpenAI’s API, you trust OpenAI. If something goes wrong, you go to OpenAI.

Web3 doesn’t have this. Agents are open source, deployed permissionlessly, and run on-chain without anyone watching. When you call a service from an unknown Agent, you can’t find out who it’s really behind, whether the code has issues, or whether it has a history of wrongdoing…

Put simply, ERC-8004 is essentially moving traditional finance’s KYC process onto the chain. And what Ethereum is betting on is that once AI Agents start touching real money, this will become a necessity.

For DeFi protocols to integrate external Agents, they first need to check the Agents’ on-chain identities. For institutions to use Agents for transaction execution, they first need to review their historical records. Audit companies can issue on-chain credentials to Agents—like performing security audits for smart contracts.

This is a strategic move to secure a position in the competition.

Ethereum knows it has already lost in the execution layer, but nobody owns the trust layer yet. Institutional recognition, the security audit ecosystem, and the scale of TVL—these are Ethereum’s existing assets. ERC-8004 packages these assets into a standard, racing to define what “AI Agent compliance” looks like before others do.

But the question is: does this need exist today?

Standards come before demand

After laying out Ethereum’s calculations, let’s get real. What are on-chain AI Agents doing right now?

After the wave of AI memes last year ran its course, and with a few leading AI companies making rapid leaps in AI products over the past one or two years, not many people are paying attention to on-chain AI Agents anymore.

But they’ve still made progress.

For example, ai16z has already renamed itself to ElizaOS, evolving from a single Agent into a cross-chain platform. Virtuals Protocol is building AI DAPPs and plans to move into physical robots in 2026. Also, some AI Agents like those in Surf can automatically execute DeFi trading strategies.

But the problem is: do they really need ERC-8004?

Luna’s users trust Luna because it’s made by the core team at Virtuals. Agents on ElizaOS are used because they run within the ElizaOS framework; Surf helps you execute strategies, and many times you’re trusting the application itself.

Trust comes from the platform, not from an on-chain identity.

The scenario envisioned by ERC-8004 is: an unknown Agent comes to you. There’s no platform endorsement and no brand awareness—you can only judge whether it’s trustworthy by looking at on-chain records.

When would this scenario happen?

When AI Agents truly achieve autonomous calls across protocols, platforms, and organizational boundaries. An Agent borrows money from Aave, trades on Uniswap, then makes yield on another protocol—without any human approval throughout the whole process…

But this scenario doesn’t exist yet.

Even if today’s AI Agents have very complex features, fundamentally they still run within a single platform. They don’t need to prove themselves to unknown protocols because they simply never knock on unknown protocol doors.

Given how hot the crypto market is right now, they also have no reason to go knock on each other’s doors—unless they can work together to create a new narrative.

So ERC-8004 solves a problem of the future.

If AI Agents evolve from toys into tools, Ethereum’s trust infrastructure becomes valuable. If the scale of the Agent economy becomes large enough and cross-platform calls become the norm, ERC-8004 can start collecting tolls.

There are many “ifs.”

So in this future-facing push, the first to act is likely institutions.

At the end of 2025, SharpLink Gaming announced investing $170 million into Ethereum restaking strategies. Around the same time, exchanges saw net outflows of more than 23,000 ETH, flowing to private wallets and staking protocols.

This money might be buying Ethereum for 12 to 18 months later.

As retail investors, ERC-8004 is actually not a great catalyst.

Betting on ERC-8004 itself? It’s an open standard with no token, so you can’t invest directly—you can only find some related small projects. Betting on Ethereum isn’t impossible, but Ethereum’s price is influenced by too many factors, and AI Agents are only one narrative among them.

Therefore, right now there isn’t a clean target that lets you precisely bet on the thesis that “AI Agents need on-chain identities.”

Ethereum isn’t fully the infrastructure for AI, and Ethereum’s identity anxiety won’t be completely resolved just because AI is fully realized. Making money from “AI ID cards” is still a long road ahead.

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