Original Title: DIGITAL ASSETS: ERC-8004 and the Rise of the Machine Economy
Original Author: Laurence Smith, Fintech Blueprint
Translated by: Peggy, BlockBeats
Editor's Note: The release of ERC-8004 marks the entry of the machine economy into the "trust era" amidst the wave of AI and blockchain integration. Led by the Ethereum Foundation's dAI team and Consensys, in collaboration with heavyweight institutions like MetaMask, Google, and Coinbase, this protocol provides on-chain identity, reputation, and verification mechanisms for AI agents for the first time, breaking the long-standing isolation of autonomous software.
This article delves into how ERC-8004 constructs an open infrastructure for agent discovery and collaboration, and explores its potential in emerging AI crypto ecosystems like Tempo and Thinking Machines. With over a hundred teams already building, ERC-8004 is not just a technical standard but also the trust foundation of the machine economy.
The following is the original content:
ERC-8004: A Protocol Standard for Establishing Trust in AI Agents
Last week, the Ethereum Foundation's dAI team and Consensys released the ERC-8004 protocol, which allows AI agents to discover, verify, and transact with each other. Signatories include MetaMask, the Ethereum Foundation, Google, Coinbase, EigenLayer, ENS, and The Graph.
So far, autonomous software, including robots, models, or smart contracts, has been operating in isolation. The emergence of frameworks like A2A (Agent-to-Agent) and MCP (Model Context Protocol) enables communication between agents.
A2A provides a shared language for software agents to send structured messages, while the MCP, launched by Anthropic, allows AI models to exchange context and coordinate tasks. Both contribute to interoperability but still lack a "trust" mechanism. In other words, they cannot determine the true identity of an agent, whether its records are reliable, or if its outputs are verifiable.
ERC-8004 introduces a set of neutral on-chain registries that address this issue through on-chain identity, reputation, and verification mechanisms.
Each agent receives a portable on-chain identity, represented by an ERC-721 token, which is an NFT representing the machine. This token points to a registration file that describes the agent's name, skills, wallet, and endpoints. Because it is standardized and based on neutral infrastructure, any marketplace or browser can index it.
Agents can leave feedback for each other, tag tasks, and associate them with economic proof of payment (x402 – an abbreviation for EIP-402, which is a cryptographic receipt binding on-chain payments to off-chain interactions). For higher credibility use cases, validators can confirm outputs through hardware zones, proof-of-stake mechanisms, or zkML verification. In short, this is an open rating and auditing layer for autonomous agents.
This standard lays the foundation for machine-to-machine economic activities. It constructs a world where agents can trust each other in negotiation, transaction, and collaboration without human intermediaries. This is a continuation of the blockchain's logic of disintermediation in the realms of currency and contracts—removing platform intermediaries between AI agents.
Reportedly, over a hundred teams are currently building according to this specification.
Massive Investment in AI and Crypto Infrastructure
The release of ERC-8004 coincides with a massive influx of investment in AI economic infrastructure. Payment-oriented Layer 1 blockchain Tempo has just completed a $500 million funding round, reaching a valuation of $5 billion; AI startup Thinking Machines, founded by former OpenAI executives, has raised $2 billion, with a valuation of $12 billion.
We are witnessing the largest financing rounds in the history of AI and crypto.
Tempo is building a closed payment network optimized for stablecoins and real-world finance. This is essentially an enterprise version of the Ethereum vision: a global transaction settlement channel with high throughput and low fees. In Tempo's world, agents can process payments at machine speed, but its internal private ecosystem is controlled by its validators and fee model.
ERC-8004 can provide an open discovery and reputation layer for this ecosystem. Tempo does not need to define which agents or merchants can transact; instead, it can integrate the ERC-8004 registry so that any verified agent with a public on-chain identity can access its payment network. This will transform Tempo from a closed settlement layer into a programmable settlement layer, achieving interoperability with the broader Ethereum agent economy.
Thinking Machines is positioned at a higher level; although its goals are not yet clear, it has products aimed at training models to enhance their resilience and flexibility. This helps deploy autonomous agents on the internet that can reason, collaborate, and transact. Currently, these agents still exist in closed, vertically integrated environments.
By adopting ERC-8004, Thinking Machines can build training tools for the open economy: each model or agent can be discovered and verified on-chain, possess an ERC-721 identity token, and establish real economic reputation through x402-verified interactions. In practical terms, this means an agent from Thinking Machines can contract with data provider agents on Ethereum, pay through Tempo or other chains, and return results on-chain without human intervention.
In short, ERC-8004 can unlock programmable markets. It empowers autonomous agents to enter contracts, settle, and establish reputations on-chain, which is a key element of DeFi serving humanity.
For fintech, the short-term impact is minimal; few companies will replace APIs with agents overnight. But once agents can prove identity, credibility, and payment, they can handle a variety of tasks from credit scoring to transaction execution without platform intermediaries.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
