ERC-8004 (Trustless Agents)

ERC-8004 is built on three on-chain registries. The Identity Registry handles each agent's identity and discovery, linking it to its metadata. The Reputation Registry accumulates feedback and reputation between agents. And the Validation Registry verifies that an agent actually performed the action it claims. It is designed as a trustless extension of Google's Agent-to-Agent protocol and meant to interoperate with MCP, with a version 2 in development that broadens that support. Its contracts are curated by the 8004 team on GitHub.

It lays the infrastructure for an AI agent economy, where different agents can contract, pay and collaborate with verifiable identity and reputation. It reduces the trust problem with anonymous agents by replacing centralized branding with on-chain reputation and validation. Agents typically operate through modular smart accounts, like those of ERC-7579, and pay with off-chain signed flows or tokens, linking it to ERC-3009 and ERC-1363.

The standard, titled Trustless Agents, was officially created on 13 August 2025 and at the EIP level it remains labeled Draft, an important nuance: what gets deployed on mainnet are reference contracts, not a Final standard. It is backed by its co-authors, tied to MetaMask (Marco De Rossi), the Ethereum Foundation (Davide Crapis), Google (Jordan Ellis) and Coinbase (Erik Reppel). Any published adoption figure is perishable and should always be cited with its date and source.

Registries support evaluating agent claims; they do not automatically prove response correctness. Trust depends on validation mechanisms and reputation contributors.