ERC-8004 is the new smart contract standard of Ethereum aimed at enabling AI agents to explore, verify, and trust each other directly on-chain, paving the way for an interactive AI service market without the need for a "gatekeeper".
This upgrade does not touch the core of the Ethereum network but aims to address a missing "piece" of the AI agent ecosystem: a mechanism for registration, discovery, and reliability assessment directly within the smart contract, which can influence the activities of developers and the mainnet.
ERC-8004 is a new smart contract standard that allows AI agents to be registered, discovered, and verified for reliability directly on-chain, facilitating verifiable interactions among agents.
The focus of ERC-8004 is to provide a "standard framework" for developers to represent the identity/characteristics of AI agents and the authentication mechanism within the smart contract, rather than relying on off-chain confirmations or centralized intermediaries. This aims to enable the Ethereum mainnet to serve as a settlement layer for AI service interactions among multiple agents.
Existing frameworks like MCP and Agent2Agent have supported communication and task coordination, but there is still a gap in the "who is who" and "how trustworthy" aspects in a standardized and verifiable way on-chain. ERC-8004 is positioned to fill that gap with a common standard in smart contracts.
