When an agent possesses an "on-chain business card," how does ERC-8004 become a decentralized "AI Yellow Pages"?

Author: Jae, PANews

In 2026, with the deep integration of Web3 and AI, agents will no longer be isolated automated scripts.

Last night (January 29), Davide Crapis, head of AI at the Ethereum Foundation, announced that the AI ​​agent economy standard ERC-8004 has been launched on the mainnet. The implementation of this standard signifies that autonomous agents will build the native infrastructure for the "A2A Economy" in the Web3 ecosystem, thereby breaking the "walled garden" monopolized by centralized APIs and closed systems.

The birth of ERC-8004 is an inevitable product of the deep integration of AI and DeFi (decentralized finance), and Ethereum will have an additional identity as an "Agent coordination layer" in its continuously evolving technological narrative.

Breaking free from centralized constraints, ERC-8004 reconstructs agent trust logic.

Currently, the inter-agency economy is still in a "wilderness era" where efficiency and chaos coexist.

In the traditional AI ecosystem, interactions between agents heavily rely on "agent-to-agent protocols" provided by service providers. For example, developers collaborate through Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, but this requires all parties involved to be within a trust domain established by Google.

While this model is efficient, its vulnerability is equally evident. If the centralized node stops working due to policy or technical reasons, the entire agent collaboration network will quickly collapse, and the reputation assets accumulated by agents over long-term interactions will be unable to be transferred across platforms.

Centralized trust has become a heavy constraint, limiting the explosive growth of inter-agent economies. ERC-8004 was developed to address this issue, aiming to shift "trust in centralized entities" to "trust in cryptographic proofs".

Instead of attempting to build a large and complex system, ERC-8004 designed a lightweight and scalable on-chain registry system, aiming to provide the most basic trust primitives for AI agents.

• Identity Registry

In the design of the identity registry, each Agent will be mapped to a unique ERC-721 NFT. This is not only an ID, but also a transferable "digital ownership".

Each NFT will be associated with an "AgentCard," which will list its communication protocol, functions, and wallet address. Ethereum will thus become a global decentralized "AI Yellow Pages," where any other Agent or human user can access Agent services that meet specific task requirements through on-chain indexing.

• Reputation Registry

If the identity registry solves the problem of "who is the agent", then the reputation registry will solve the problem of "whether the agent is reliable".

Unlike centralized review systems, ERC-8004 permanently records the evaluation (score, tag, feedback hash) of each Agent service on the blockchain.

More importantly, it does not enforce a single score, but instead provides raw data, allowing third parties to develop various reputation algorithms to build diverse views. This modular design avoids scoring monopolies and ensures the resilience and fairness of the trust mechanism.

• Validate the registry.

For important tasks, "positive reviews" alone are not enough; "proof" is also required. The verification registry will provide a slot that allows access to multiple third-party verification mechanisms, from social consensus and economic staking to cryptographic proofs, to automate the "No Work, No Pay" logic. The verification results will be recorded on the blockchain, serving as a key signal for fund release or triggering penalties.

BitMine Chairman Tom Lee also summarized in an article that the agent system will operate outside the "walled garden" of the existing system, and the smart contract blockchain can prove the source of the instructions and record the final settlement of micropayments.

There is great potential for integrating technical components to build an Agent protocol stack.

The advantage of ERC-8004 lies not only in its own specification design, but also in its deep interoperability with other cutting-edge technologies in the Ethereum ecosystem. This synergy may give rise to a complete "Agent protocol stack".

• x402 Payment Agreement

The x402 payment protocol launched by Coinbase may become the best partner for ERC-8004, as it solves the problem of micropayments between agents.

AI can automatically settle service fees, forming a task flow of "work-payment-reputation update". This closed-loop chain may reduce the degree of human intervention and allow the inter-agent economy to operate autonomously.

• Oasis ROFL framework

AI models typically run on opaque off-chain hardware, making the computation process resemble a "black box." The ROFL (Runtime Off-chain Logic) framework introduced by the Oasis protocol may fill this trust gap.

The ROFL framework can generate cryptographic proofs within a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) to verify whether the Agent is running with the specified model and parameters. The proof results will be anchored to the verification registry.

For users, what they trust is "verified code," not external third parties.

• ERC-6551

If ERC-8004 is the Agent's "digital business card" and "professional credit file," then ERC-6551 (token-linked account) is the Agent's "wallet."

When an ERC-8004 Agent ID is bound to its own ERC-6551 account, the Agent gains the ability to hold and manage assets, sign contracts, and autonomously interact on-chain.

This combination of "identity + property rights" will allow the Agent to become an independent economic entity.

A highly automated scenario may gradually emerge: DeFi protocols can automatically search for reputable, TEE-verified arbitrage agents on the "yellow pages," entrust them with asset allocation, and automatically pay rewards through x402, all without any human intervention.

When 90% of traffic and transactions in the market are driven by agents, whoever controls the pricing power of trust will control the future digital hegemony.

Ethereum is attempting to gain dominance in this "inter-agency economy" game, and ERC-8004 is its first move.