A few days ago, @brucexu_eth reminded me to pay attention to Ethereum's ERC8004 proposal. It seems that the Ethereum community is already preparing for the arrival of on-chain AI agent economies.

In simple terms, ERC8004 aims to create "trustless AI agents" within the Ethereum ecosystem, introducing three on-chain registries: Identity, Reputation, and Validation. This allows AI agents to discover each other, validate tasks, and interact on-chain without the need for trust. In other words, it enables AI agents to play among themselves, forming a decentralized A2A system that allows AI agents to collaborate across organizations.

This concept appears to have some similarities with Virtuals' ACP protocol, both focusing on the construction, interaction, and economic ecology of decentralized AI agents; both are building autonomous ecosystems for AI agents; and both emphasize cryptography as the foundation for trust and settlement (ERC-8004 uses ERC-721 tokens as agent identities, supports real-time stablecoin payments (combining EIP-3009 and HTTP 402), and ensures task validation through re-staking and zero-knowledge proofs; Virtuals' ACP provides a framework that supports AI agents in autonomous communication on-chain and off-chain, coordinating tasks and interactions without intermediaries or permissions, with on-chain smart contracts handling core interactions and off-chain APIs or P2P networks supporting high-frequency data exchange (real-time messages, computation results, etc.); ACP assigns on-chain identities to each AI agent and prices and trades them through a bonding curve mechanism.

However, the two are primarily complementary rather than competitive.

ERC-8004 is a protocol standard (draft not finalized as of August 2025), similar to ERC-20, aiming to define universal rules for AI agent interactions across the entire Ethereum ecosystem, with a greater focus on underlying trust mechanisms and interoperability. ERC-8004 can attract developers to build cross-organizational AI agent ecosystems through standardized identity, reputation, and validation mechanisms. Virtuals, on the other hand, provides a ready-to-use platform that allows users (including non-developers) to quickly create and monetize AI agents. Different users may choose different entry points; some users who want to quickly launch AI agents may opt for Virtuals because it is simple (only 100 VIRTUAL tokens are needed to start).

The vision of ERC-8004 is to become a foundational trust infrastructure, making Ethereum a neutral and trustworthy settlement layer for AI agent coordination. From simple social robots to complex institutional-level AI hedge fund strategies, interactions and validations can occur safely and transparently on this foundation. Virtuals' vision is to create an active AI economy, focusing more on low-barrier agent creation, tokenized co-ownership, and rich application scenarios (such as AI companions, traders, game characters), rapidly building a prosperous AI agent market and community. Virtuals ACP is akin to a "business assembly line": the core of the ACP protocol defines a complete "business process" for complex commercial collaboration between AI agents. From initiating requests, negotiating terms, executing transactions, to final evaluations, it outlines how business is completed step by step. This "assembly line" can be built on the "trust cornerstone" provided by ERC-8004.

Therefore, from a broader framework perspective, ERC-8004 serves as the underlying standard, defining the trust and interaction rules for AI agents. Virtuals operates at the application layer, with many of Virtuals' features (such as agent identity and task validation) being directly implementable based on ERC-8004. Currently, the Ethereum Foundation is also collaborating with Virtuals to achieve ecological synergy; for example, Virtuals' agent market can use ERC-8004's on-chain registries to enhance cross-chain interoperability, attracting more developers to join the Virtuals platform. Additionally, both are working to expand the "AI agent economy" pie, with ERC-8004 lowering development barriers to attract institutions and large developers, while Virtuals draws in ordinary users and creators through low-cost entry. To make a somewhat imperfect analogy, ERC-8004 is more like the "highway network standards," specifying road width, lane markings, and signal systems. In contrast, Virtuals operates "smart logistics and business companies" on this highway, with its own fleet (AI agents), scheduling systems (ACP protocol), etc., allowing it to enter a larger network through the standards of ERC8004.

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