The Ethereum Foundation's dAI team and Consensys have launched the ERC-8004 protocol to guide the AI agent economy.

Golden Finance reports that the Ethereum Foundation's dAI team and Consensys today announced the final version of ERC-8004, a protocol that allows artificial intelligence agents to discover, verify, and collaborate with each other without a centralized intermediary. This development bridges the gap between blockchain and artificial intelligence. The ERC-8004 was drafted in August this year and addresses this issue through three lightweight on-chain registries (identity, reputation, and verification). Since its launch, ERC-8004 has facilitated many prototypes and generated widespread interest, with over a hundred companies planning to build on this protocol. The final specification announced today was signed by Marco De Rossi (MetaMask), Davide Crapis (Ethereum Foundation), Jordan Ellis (Google), and Erik Reppel (Coinbase), and incorporates extensive community feedback, including contributions from Cisco, EigenLayer, Eliza Labs, ENS, Nethermind, OpenZeppelin, Phala, The Graph, and Virtuals. ERC-8004 assigns a portable on-chain identity to each intermediary as an ERC-721 token, meaning the intermediary is tokenized as an NFT and can be minted, viewed in wallets, transferred, and managed (including granting permissions to operators) using existing ERC-721 applications. The token points to a standard-based registration document that describes the intermediary's name, skills, and public endpoints (including A2A, MCP, ENS/did, and wallets). Since this description follows open standards on neutral infrastructure, it can be indexed by any browser or marketplace, enabling permissionless discovery across vendors and platforms. In addition to identity and discovery, ERC-8004 also implements on-chain reputation: clients and agents can submit structured feedback with tags, such as based on skills or tasks, and attach x402 payment proofs when relevant to enhance trustworthiness in economic interactions.