Original: Deep Tide TechFlow

On January 28, Ethereum’s official announcement said the ERC-8004 protocol is about to go live on the mainnet.

We already mentioned this in our article last October; if you don’t know it at all, you can refer to here: 《x402 As it gets more and more competitive, seize the new asset opportunities in ERC-8004 early》

In fact, it has an official name: “Trustless Agents,” trustless agents. If you translate it into plain talk, it roughly means:

Give an AI Agent an on-chain ID.

The Ethereum Foundation rarely puts this much effort behind pushing an ERC standard. They even specifically set up a team called dAI, added ERC-8004 to the 2026 strategic roadmap, and worked with Google, Coinbase, and MetaMask to draft it together. In November, they also held a Trustless Agents Day at DevConnect to drum up momentum.

The last time Ethereum pushed standards this seriously was ERC-20 and ERC-721.

One defines tokens. One defines NFTs.

Now it’s AI’s turn?

Ethereum’s AI Anxiety

Why so urgent?

Look at a set of data. According to Cookie.fun’s statistics, the market-cap distribution of AI Agent tokens: Solana and Base combined account for 96%. You can count the AI Agent projects that are well-known on Ethereum mainnet on one hand.

You can count the AI Agent projects that are well-known on Ethereum mainnet on one hand.

In April 2025, ETH’s exchange rate versus BTC fell to 0.017, a five-year low. People said back then that Ethereum isn’t the future.

When DeFi was hot, Ethereum was the home turf. When NFTs were hot, Ethereum was also the home turf. When AI Agents heated up, the home turf changed.

Solana processes 36 million transactions a day, while Ethereum mainnet processes 1.13 million. With high gas fees and slow speed, developers voted with their feet. When Virtuals Protocol launched on Base, earlier ai16z chose Solana—besides, even Coinbase’s own AI project didn’t get placed on Ethereum mainnet.

Ethereum needs a new story.

ERC-8004 might be the start of that story.

Let’s Recap ERC-8004

Back to the standard itself.

How exactly does ERC-8004 handle the “giving AI Agents an on-chain ID” thing?

You don’t need to understand any technical details—you just need to know there are three registries.

The first is the identity registry. Based on ERC-721, each AI Agent mints an NFT to prove “it is who it says it is.”

The second is the reputation registry. It records the Agent’s historical performance: who has used it, what people thought of it, and whether it has done anything bad.

The third is the verification registry. It lets third-party institutions stamp and endorse the Agent—such as “this Agent passed a certain security audit.”

With these three ledgers combined, it solves one problem: when two AI Agents meet on-chain, how do you know whether the other is trustworthy?

In the past, the answer was: you don’t know—you can only rely on people. The answer from ERC-8004 is: check the on-chain records.

This set of ideas wasn’t created by Ethereum itself.

Its underlying logic comes from Google’s A2A protocol released last year—Agent-to-Agent—so that AI can talk to and call each other. On top of that, ERC-8004 adds one more layer:

Trust backed by the blockchain.

Google’s A2A solves the communication problem; Ethereum’s ERC-8004 solves the trust problem. One handles the talking, one verifies the identity.

Is “issuing IDs” a good business?

Let’s take a bold guess about Ethereum’s logic—something like this:

For an AI Agent to be truly useful, it has to be able to manage money on its own. It’s not about tweeting or chatting; it’s directly operating on-chain assets. Signing transactions, calling contracts, cross-protocol arbitrage…

Right now, nobody dares to do this at scale. The reason is simple: how do you know this Agent won’t transfer away your money? The ClawdBot that has been exploding in popularity these days already has community users posting related negative incidents.

Web2’s solution is platform endorsement. You use OpenAI’s API, and your trust comes from OpenAI. If something goes wrong, you go to OpenAI.

Web3 doesn’t have this. Agents are open source, deployments are permissionless, and no one oversees them on-chain. You call a stranger’s Agent service—who’s behind it, whether the code has issues, whether it has a history of wrongdoing… you can’t find any of that.

To put it bluntly, ERC-8004 essentially moves the traditional finance KYC process onto the chain. And what Ethereum is betting on is: once AI Agents start touching real money, this will become a necessity.

For DeFi protocols to integrate external Agents, they have to first check the Agent’s on-chain identity. If institutions want to use Agents to execute trades, they have to first look at its historical records. Audit firms can issue on-chain certifications to Agents—just like doing security audits for smart contracts.

This is a competitive “first-mover” positioning move.

Ethereum knows it has already lost in the execution layer, but no one has claimed the trust layer yet. Institutional recognition, security-audit ecosystem, TVL scale—these are the assets Ethereum already has. ERC-8004 packages these assets into a standard, rushing to define what “compliance for AI Agents” looks like before others do.

The question is: does this demand exist right now?

Standards come before demand

After laying out Ethereum’s calculations, it’s time to face reality. What are on-chain AI Agents doing right now?

After the wave of AI memes last year ran its course, and with several leading AI companies making rapid progress in AI products over the past one or two years, not many people are still paying attention to on-chain AI Agents.

But they still have momentum.

For example, ai16z has already renamed itself to ElizaOS—shifting from a single Agent to a cross-chain platform. Virtuals Protocol is working on an AI DAPP and plans to move into physical robots in 2026. Also, some AI Agents in Surf can automatically execute DeFi trading strategy logic.

But here’s the problem: do they really need ERC-8004?

Luna’s users trust Luna because it’s built by Virtuals’ core team. People use Agents on ElizaOS because they run within the ElizaOS framework; Surf helps execute strategies, and many times you trust the application itself.

Trust comes from the platform, not from an on-chain identity.

The scenario envisioned by ERC-8004 is this: an unknown Agent comes to you. Without platform endorsement and without brand awareness, you can only judge whether it’s trustworthy by looking at on-chain records.

When would this scenario happen?

When AI Agents truly achieve autonomous calls across protocols, platforms, and organizational boundaries. An Agent borrows money from Aave, trades on Uniswap, then moves to another protocol to generate yield—through the whole process, without human approval…

But this scenario doesn’t exist right now.

Even if today’s AI Agents are more complex, at their core they still run within a single platform. They don’t need to prove themselves to unknown protocols, because they basically never knock on a stranger’s door.

Given how hot the crypto market is right now, they also have no reason to knock on each other’s doors—unless they can work together to create a new narrative.

So ERC-8004 solves a future problem.

If AI Agents evolve from toys into tools, then Ethereum’s trust infrastructure becomes valuable. If the scale of the Agent economy becomes large enough and cross-platform calls become the norm, ERC-8004 can collect toll fees.

There are a lot of “ifs.”

So for this future-oriented play, the first movers are likely to be institutions.

At the end of 2025, SharpLink Gaming announced it would invest $170 million into Ethereum re-staking strategies. Around the same time, the exchanges’ net outflow of ETH exceeded 23k coins, flowing into private wallets and staking protocols.

This money may be buying Ethereum for 12 to 18 months from now.

As retail investors, ERC-8004 isn’t really a very good catalyst.

Betting on ERC-8004 itself? It’s an open standard with no token—so you can’t invest directly; you can only look for some related small projects. Betting on Ethereum isn’t impossible either, but Ethereum’s price is influenced by too many factors, and AI Agents are only one narrative among them.

Therefore, right now there is no clean asset that lets you accurately bet on the thesis that “AI Agents need on-chain identities.”

Ethereum isn’t only the infrastructure for AI, and Ethereum’s identity anxiety won’t be fully relieved even if AI becomes ubiquitous. The business of issuing AI IDs is still a long road ahead.

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