If the emergence of x402 validates the immense demand for AI agent payments, then ERC-8004 represents another foundational core element necessary for constructing this vast machine economy.
Written by: Lacie Zhang, Researcher at Bitget Wallet
1. Introduction: From the Buzz Around x402 to the Arrival of ERC-8004
Recently, with the x402 protocol, designed specifically for automatic micropayments between AI agents, becoming a market hotspot, discussions about its early potential have been incessant. However, beneath the halo of x402, a more fundamental standard—ERC-8004—has quietly entered the sights of keen observers.
A new question arises: since x402 is already focused on solving payment issues, what is the positioning of ERC-8004? Are the two in competition?
The answer seems to be negative. They are more like a pair of intricately designed, complementary components within the commercial landscape of AI agents.
Source: X post by Davide Crapis, AI Lead at the Ethereum Foundation
A noteworthy detail is that Erik Reppel, the creator of x402 from Coinbase, is also one of the final signatories of the ERC-8004 protocol. Alongside him, core representatives from MetaMask, Google, and the Ethereum Foundation also signed this standard. This heavyweight lineup and the high degree of personnel overlap strongly suggest that the two are not in competition but are collaboratively building a grander blueprint.
The logic of this blueprint is quite clear: if the emergence of x402 validates the immense demand for AI agent payments, then ERC-8004 represents another foundational core element necessary for constructing this vast machine economy. It precisely targets the core problem that x402 cannot solve alone—where does trust come from in an economy of AI agents collaborating autonomously? The Bitget Wallet Research Institute may help you find the answer in this article.
2. The "Trust" Issue in Agent Collaboration: A Dilemma Unsolvable by x402 Alone
In the commercial collaboration of AI agents, payment (the issue solved by x402) is merely the last step of a closed loop. A more fundamental question precedes it: how can one AI agent be sure that another AI agent it employs is trustworthy? In other words, how can agents prove their capability to fulfill the tasks they are assigned?
To answer this question, we need to explore the foundational framework of agent commerce. According to the theory supported by Davide Crapis from the Ethereum Foundation, a decentralized AI agent commercial system must rely on three pillars to operate stably: Discovery, Communication, and Computation.
Source: X tweet forwarded by Davide Crapis
From the table above, it can be seen that the x402 protocol primarily addresses the payment standard issue within the communication layer, but it cannot answer the critical questions of identity verification and reputation assessment. Before making a payment, AI agents first need to be securely "discovered" to build trust and collaboration—ERC-8004 is precisely aimed at solving this problem by establishing a decentralized trust layer.
ERC-8004 was jointly launched by the Ethereum Foundation's dAI team and Consensys, in collaboration with institutions like MetaMask, Google, and Coinbase, aiming to become the on-chain "trust layer" for AI agents. It is a decentralized business registration and recording system—providing each AI agent with a verifiable identity, complete historical performance, and capability proof. All information will be immutably recorded on-chain and made publicly accessible to all participants.
Source: ERC-8004 official website
3. ERC-8004: The Decentralized Trust Layer for Agents
ERC-8004 is positioned as the underlying infrastructure of the agent economy, with its core value being: through blockchain technology, it addresses the fundamental issue of the lack of trustworthy identities among AI agents, freeing them from the constraints of traditional centralized platforms and establishing verifiable, cross-platform collaborative relationships.
The operation of this mechanism begins with ecosystem contributors inputting trust data: AI developers are responsible for registering the unique identities of agents; application developers continuously provide behavioral feedback on agents to accumulate reputation data; and verification services act as independent auditors, providing trustworthy on-chain verification of agents' operational results.
Source: Compiled by Bitget Wallet
This information collectively feeds into the ERC-8004 registration center, which consolidates the three core functions of the protocol:
Identity Registry: It assigns a unique digital identity to each AI agent through the ERC-721 NFT protocol. This design not only makes identities transferable but also allows them to link to standardized "Agent Cards," which detail the agent's name, capabilities, and metadata, ultimately enabling permissionless discovery across platforms.
Reputation Registry: This mechanism acts as a decentralized review system based on identity registration. Clients or other agents can submit structured feedback. The key design is that these evaluations can be linked to x402 payment proofs, ensuring that only genuine transaction participants can provide assessments, thereby effectively reducing fraud and ensuring the public transparency of all reputation data.
Validation Registry: It provides final assurance for high-risk or high-value transactions. Agents can request trusted verification from third parties, such as TEE oracles, staked inference, or zero-knowledge machine learning proofs (ZK-ML proofs). These verification methods can provide cryptographic proof for specific model executions and outputs, thereby establishing a verifiable accountability mechanism similar to traditional market professional certifications.
Relying on the trustworthy data foundation provided by ERC-8004, a brand new downstream application ecosystem can thrive, such as browsers for agent discovery and queries (Explorers), marketplaces allowing agents to trade freely based on reputation (Marketplaces), and professional rating agencies (Rating Agencies), even giving rise to innovative services like InfoFi and AgentFi. These advanced applications are all built on the trustworthy identities and verification records of agents, marking the formal establishment of a permissionless, efficiently collaborative agent service ecosystem.
4. Collaborative Operation: The Complete Process of an Agent Transaction
So, how do these components work together in practice? The complete lifecycle of a decentralized AI agent transaction may clearly illustrate this process.
Source: Compiled by Bitget Wallet
First, the demand-side Agent uses the ERC-8004 identity and reputation registry to discover and evaluate services, querying and filtering for service agents with specific capabilities and good credit.
After both parties reach an agreement, the demand-side then locks the required fees in a smart contract (i.e., financial assurance) through the x402 payment protocol.
Subsequently, the service agent begins executing the task and accepts third-party verification, with its work results running on a verifiable computation layer like EigenCompute and generating cryptographic proof, which is then recorded by an independent third-party verification agent in the ERC-8004 validation registry.
Finally, the automatic settlement phase begins, where the x402 smart contract automatically detects the trustworthy signature in the ERC-8004 validation registry, and once the task is confirmed to be qualified, the funds are automatically released to the service agent.
In this closed-loop process, ERC-8004 is responsible for access and acceptance, x402 handles payments, and verifiable computation ensures the process, with none of the three being dispensable. This also indicates that, unlike the early focus on payment tokens in x402, the ecosystem of ERC-8004 (as shown in the figure below) will be distributed across multiple levels, including infrastructure, middleware, and applications.
Source: BlockFlow
5. Conclusion: The Order and Future of the Machine Economy
One point that must be acknowledged is that ERC-8004 is still in the early stages of promotion and implementation—the cold start of related products and whether its grand vision of encompassing "machine economy identity verification" can be realized remains to be observed in the market. Additionally, the costs and specific implementation paths of third-party verification, as well as its interoperability with protocols like x402, are significant variables that need to be addressed in the future.
However, what can be confirmed is that the emergence of protocols like ERC-8004 marks a transition of the machine economy from "barbaric growth" to "establishing order." It provides a cross-platform identity and credit system for autonomously operating AI agents for the first time.
If x402 is the "currency" of the machine economy, then what ERC-8004 provides is the "passport" and "credit report," marking the formal beginning of a permissionless, efficiently collaborative, and trustworthy agent service ecosystem.
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