Original: Deep Tide TechFlow

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

We mentioned this standard in our article last October. If you don’t know anything about it, you can refer to it here: 《x402 The market is gradually getting more and more saturated; seize the new asset opportunities inside ERC-8004》

It actually has a formal name: “Trustless Agents,” which literally means trust-avoidant agents. Translating it 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, put ERC-8004 into the 2026 strategic roadmap, and worked with Google, Coinbase, and MetaMask to draft the proposal together. In November, they even held a Trustless Agents Day at DevConnect to drum up momentum.

The last time Ethereum promoted a standard with this seriousness was ERC-20 and ERC-721.

One defines tokens; one defines NFTs.

Now it’s AI’s turn?

Ethereum’s AI Anxiety

Why is it so urgent?

Take a 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%. On Ethereum’s mainnet, there are only a handful of AI Agent projects that are well-known enough to name.

On Ethereum’s mainnet, there are only a handful of AI Agent projects that are well-known enough to name.

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

When DeFi was hot, Ethereum was the home ground. When NFTs were hot, Ethereum was also the home ground. When AI Agents started heating up, the home ground changed.

Solana processes 36 million transactions per day, while Ethereum mainnet handles 1.13 million. With high gas fees and slow speed, developers voted with their feet. Virtuals Protocol launched on Base. Earlier, ai16z chose Solana, and even Coinbase’s own AI projects weren’t placed on Ethereum mainnet.

Ethereum needs a new story.

ERC-8004 might be the opening chapter of that story.

Revisit ERC-8004

Back to the standard itself.

So how exactly does ERC-8004 handle the “issuing on-chain ID to AI Agents” thing?

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

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

The second is the Reputation Registry. It records the Agent’s historical performance: who has used it, what their evaluations were like, and whether it has ever done anything bad.

The third is the Verification Registry. It allows third-party organizations to “stamp and endorse” the Agent—such as “this Agent has passed a certain security audit.”

Together, these three notebooks solve one problem: when two AI Agents meet on-chain, how do you know whether the other party is reliable?

Before, the answer was that you didn’t know—you could only rely on people. ERC-8004’s answer is to check the on-chain records.

This set of ideas wasn’t created by Ethereum itself.

Its underlying logic comes from Google’s A2A protocol released last year—Agent-to-Agent—so that AI can talk to and call each other. On top of that, ERC-8004 adds a 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 handles verifying identity.

Is issuing IDs a good business?

Let’s take a bold guess about what Ethereum’s logic might be:

For an AI Agent to be truly useful, it needs to be able to manage money on its own. Not posting on Twitter, not chatting—directly operating on on-chain assets. Signing transactions, calling contracts, cross-protocol arbitrage…

At the moment, nobody dares to do this at scale. The reason is simple: how do you know the Agent won’t transfer away your money? The ClawdBot that’s been exploding in popularity these days already has community users posting related negative incidents.

Web2’s solution is platform endorsement. If you use OpenAI’s API, the trust comes from OpenAI. If something goes wrong, you go after OpenAI.

Web3 doesn’t have that. Agents are open source; deployment is permissionless; they run on-chain with no one overseeing them. When you call a service from a stranger Agent, you can’t know who is behind it, whether the code has issues, or whether it has a history of doing harm…

To put it plainly, at its core, ERC-8004 is moving the traditional finance KYC process onto the blockchain. And what Ethereum is betting on is that once AI Agents start touching real money, this will become a must-have.

For DeFi protocols to integrate external Agents, they need to first check the Agent’s on-chain identity. If institutions want to use an Agent for transaction execution, they need to first examine its historical record. Audit firms can issue on-chain certifications to Agents—like conducting security audits for smart contracts.

This is a competitive positioning move.

Ethereum knows it has already lost in the execution layer, but no one has claimed the trust layer yet. Institutional recognition, the security audit ecosystem, the size of TVL—these are Ethereum’s existing assets. ERC-8004 packages these assets into a standard, rushing to define what “compliance for AI Agents” looks like before anyone else does.

The question is: does this need exist right now?

Standards come before demand

After discussing Ethereum’s calculations, let’s face reality: what are on-chain AI Agents doing now?

After last year’s AI meme wave ended, and given how major AI companies have made rapid breakthroughs in AI products over the past one or two years, not many people are still paying attention to on-chain AI Agents.

But they’ve still made progress.

For example, ai16z has already rebranded to ElizaOS, shifting from a single Agent into a cross-chain platform. Virtuals Protocol is working on AI DAPPs and plans to move into physical robotics in 2026. Others, like the AI Agents in Surf, can also automatically execute DeFi trading strategies.

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

Luna’s users trust Luna because it’s built by Virtuals’ core team. Agents on ElizaOS get used because they run within the ElizaOS framework. Surf helps you execute strategies, and many times people trust Surf itself as an application.

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

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

When would this scenario happen?

When AI Agents truly achieve autonomous calling across protocol boundaries, platform boundaries, and organizational boundaries. An Agent borrows money from Aave, trades on Uniswap, then makes a yield on another protocol—through the whole process with no human approval…

But this scenario doesn’t exist yet.

Right now, even if today’s AI Agents are complex, at their core they still run within a single platform. They don’t need to prove themselves to a stranger protocol, because they basically would never go knocking on a stranger protocol’s door.

Given the current hype in crypto markets, they also don’t have a reason to go knocking 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 is large enough and cross-platform calling becomes the norm, ERC-8004 can collect tolls.

There are a lot of ifs.

So, in this future-oriented rollout, the first to act is likely to be institutions.

By the end of 2025, SharpLink Gaming announced it would allocate $170 million into Ethereum re-staking strategies. Around the same time, exchanges saw net outflows of ETH exceeding 23,000 coins, flowing into private wallets and staking protocols.

This money might be buying Ethereum a year to 18 months from now.

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

Betting on ERC-8004 itself? It’s an open standard with no token—you can’t invest directly; you can only look for some smaller projects linked to it. Betting on Ethereum is also not impossible, but Ethereum’s price is affected by too many factors, and AI Agents are only one of the narratives.

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

Ethereum is not entirely AI infrastructure, and Ethereum’s identity anxiety won’t be fully resolved just because AI fully matures. The business of making AI IDs still has a long road ahead.

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