As the agent-economy advances, the need for a common infrastructure becomes critical. ERC-8004 presents a lightweight yet powerful standard to coordinate autonomous agents across chain boundaries. It doesn’t prescribe detailed logic—but provides the minimum primitives needed so individual projects can build differentiated solutions.
What is ERC-8004?
It’s a proposed standard that defines three on-chain registries – Identity, Reputation & Validation – to support discovery and interaction of autonomous agents in a permissionless context.
Identity registry: Gives each agent a unique ID, address, and domain pointer; capabilities are stored off-chain for flexibility.
Reputation registry: Enables agents to authorize clients to leave feedback; the onchain events provide an audit trail while the data sits offchain.
Validation registry: Allows for different trust/validation models: crypto‐economic staking, TEEs/ZK, or social consensus depending on the use case.
Why this matters for developers
It creates a shared namespace so your agents are discoverable by other agents or clients in the ecosystem.
It supports modular trust models– you decide whether your agent uses simple feedback, staking, or hardware enclaves.
It avoids unnecessary opinionation: No lock-in of how you build the agent. The spec remains minimal and future‐proof.
Implementation notes & opportunities
Using the ROFL (Run-Offchain Function-Logic) framework from Oasis, you can deploy agent logic into a TEE enclave, get cryptographic attestations, register your agent’s ID via ERC-8004, and optionally register staking validators for higher‐assurance tasks.
oasis.net
The spec is evolving: version 2 plans include support for multi-chain wallets (MCP), NFT-based agent ownership (via ERC-721), and richer onchain reputation data.
oasis.net
What you can build now
Marketplace of agents that trade tasks (e.g., code review bots, DeFi strategy executors) using the identity & reputation registry.
A validation system where agents are audited offchain (TEE/ZK) and results are registered onchain for transparency.
Cross-agent collaboration networks where reputation is portable and discovery is standardized.
If you’re working on autonomous agents—whether for DeFi, gaming, data services, or AI—consider integrating ERC-8004 registries to make your agent discoverable, interoperable and trust-aware. The infrastructure piece is now available; the innovation is in what agents do.
Full thread can be found here: https://oasis.net/blog/erc-8004-trustless-agents
Top comments (3)
Great to see an infrastructure standard like this emerge. Identity + Reputation + Validation, it's the exact blueprint needed for truly trustless collaboration. The innovation is definitely moving to the agent layer now.
This is a solid dive into ERC‑8004! I like how it lays out enabling autonomous agents to operate trustlessly across on-chain and off-chain environments, and the focus on secure execution with TEEs makes it practical, not just theoretical.
This is a great breakdown! ERC-8004 feels like that missing coordination layer for onchain and offchain agents. The modular trust model is especially smart; not every agent needs the same validation cost. The tie-in with Oasis ROFL is what caught my attention too, verifiable off-chain logic inside TEEs could make autonomous systems both scalable and trustworthy.