Ethereum developers are preparing to deploy ERC-8004, a new smart contract standard designed to let artificial intelligence agents discover each other, establish identity, and assess trust without prior relationships. The proposal, introduced in August 2025, aims to support open, cross-organizational agent economies on blockchain infrastructure.
Marco De Rossi, head of AI at MetaMask and a co-author of the proposal, said development on the contracts has now frozen and a mainnet deployment is expected midweek.
“We will go to mainnet midweek, probably around Thursday 9 AM ET,” De Rossi wrote in a Telegram update to developers.
The official Ethereum account confirmed the rollout timeline on X, stating that ERC-8004 would go live “soon,” without specifying an exact date.
ERC-8004 is going live on mainnet soon.
— Ethereum (@ethereum) January 27, 2026
By enabling discovery and portable reputation, ERC-8004 allows AI agents to interact across organizations ensuring credibility travels everywhere.
This unlocks a global market where AI services can interoperate without gatekeepers. https://t.co/Yrl0rvnSxj
Standard targets discovery and trust gaps in agent systems
ERC-8004 addresses two structural problems that persist in current agent-based systems: how autonomous agents find one another, and how they decide which counterparts deserve trust.
Protocols such as Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent already manage agent communication, authentication, and task execution. However, these frameworks rely on pre-existing trust relationships or closed registries, which limit interoperability once agents operate across companies, chains, or jurisdictions.
“To foster an open, cross-organizational agent economy, we need mechanisms for discovering and trusting agents in untrusted settings,” the proposal states.
ERC-8004 proposes a shared, on-chain approach that avoids platform gatekeepers and does not require changes to Ethereum’s core protocol.
Three registries form the protocol backbone
The standard introduces three lightweight registries that can deploy on Ethereum mainnet or layer-2 networks.
The identity registry assigns each agent a unique on-chain identifier through an ERC-721-style token. This identifier resolves to an agent registration file that describes capabilities, services, and supported protocols. Ownership of the identifier defines ownership of the agent and supports transfer or delegation.
The reputation registry allows clients, human or machine, to submit signed feedback about an agent. Feedback stores raw signals on-chain, while scoring and aggregation can occur off-chain. The registry avoids ranking agents directly and instead makes reputation data composable across applications.
The validation registry provides hooks for independent verification of agent output. Validators may include staked re-execution services, zero-knowledge machine learning proofs, trusted execution environments, or other verification systems. Results remain visible on-chain.
ERC-8004 does not define payments, pricing, or marketplaces. The proposal frames the standard as infrastructure rather than a commercial layer.
Developers refine design after heavy review
The road to deployment involved extensive community and auditor feedback. De Rossi said the team processed hundreds of comments and messages during final review.
“We are late because of the hundreds of comments and messages we received from the community and from auditors,” he said.
He credited Nethermind, Cyfrin, and the Ethereum Foundation security team for providing free audits of the contracts.
Several design changes followed this review. The reputation system replaced a fixed score with a value and valueDecimals structure, which now supports negative values, decimals, and figures above 100. This adjustment allows signals such as uptime percentages, downvotes, or revenue figures tied to x402 payments.
The proposal also added best-practice guidance for feedback tagging and renamed “endpoints” to “services” in the agent registration file to avoid ambiguity.
ERC-8004 is now frozen, with final contracts live on testnet while explorers and tooling providers update integrations.
Ethereum positions itself for agent economies
Developers and foundation contributors view ERC-8004 as a step toward turning AI agents into economic actors rather than isolated tools.
“By enabling discovery and portable reputation, ERC-8004 allows AI agents to interact across organizations ensuring credibility travels everywhere,” Ethereum said on X. “This unlocks a global market where AI services can interoperate without gatekeepers.”
Davide Crapis, AI lead at the Ethereum Foundation and a co-author of the proposal, said Ethereum occupies a unique role in this emerging landscape.
“Ethereum is in the unique position to be the platform that secures and settles AI-to-AI interactions,” Crapis said.
The standard also supports deployment on layer-2 networks. Developers confirmed compatibility with Base, a Coinbase-backed layer-2 that supports x402, an open protocol for automated stablecoin payments over HTTP.
Security limits remain explicit
The proposal acknowledges risks that the standard does not eliminate. These include Sybil attacks, misleading capability claims, and reliance on external validation systems.
ERC-8004 does not cryptographically guarantee that agents behave correctly or honestly. Instead, it relies on layered trust models that scale security based on value at risk, from low-stake tasks such as food ordering to high-stake use cases such as medical analysis.
By formalizing identity, reputation, and validation without central control, ERC-8004 aims to provide shared rails for agent coordination, while leaving enforcement and economics to higher-level protocols.
Oleksii Shumak
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