What ERC 8004 Tries To Solve
AI agents need a way to identify themselves, prove what they did, and accumulate reputational history across different environments.
Today this is fragmented. Each API or platform uses its own identity model, its own reputation rules, and its own trust signals.
ERC 8004 proposes a shared framework so that autonomous agents can reliably interact across chains and systems.
Identity Registry
The standard introduces a common identity layer where each agent is represented as a token.
The token points to a JSON document called an agent card.
The card contains information such as capabilities, metadata, links to external profiles, and service endpoints.
This allows clients and other agents to discover what an agent can do without depending on centralized API registries.
Validation Registry
Agents produce outputs that sometimes must be verified.
ERC 8004 defines a mechanism for validators to respond to requests, return results, and attach supporting information such as proof files or reexecution traces.
This is important for tasks where correctness matters, including code generation, data transformation, or fact-based responses.
Reputation Registry
Trust grows when feedback is consistent across platforms.
The reputation layer lets users or clients leave structured feedback that agents can carry with them.
Feedback can include scores, tags, and optional file references.
The goal is to create a portable reputation footprint instead of siloed rating systems.
Trustless Agents
When identity, validation, and reputation are standardized, an agent can operate without relying on a single platform.
The agent becomes portable.
The client does not need to trust the hosting company but only the chain-level registries.
This creates a foundation for agent markets, agent-to-agent commerce, and autonomous services.
Why This Matters
Developers gain an open and verifiable way to expose AI services.
Users get transparent trust signals.
Platforms can interoperate instead of locking agents inside proprietary ecosystems.
This moves AI services toward the same open model that helped the web grow.
Real Use Cases
Running autonomous assistants that perform API calls with verifiable logs
Building agent marketplaces where discovery and scoring work across vendors
Creating validator networks for correctness checking
Composing multiple agents into pipelines without hidden trust assumptions
How To Start
Build an agent card describing capabilities and metadata
Register it through an identity registry implementation
Use the validation and reputation registries to attach proof and feedback data
Publish your agent so other clients or agents can discover and interact with it
ERC 8004 is still young but it has practical design goals.
It aims for interoperability, transparency, and portable trust.
As the agent ecosystem grows, shared standards like this will become essential infrastructure. Full article can be accessed through this link.
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