On January 30, 2026, at 8:00 AM UTC+8, the ERC-8004 standard, led by Davide Crapis, the AI head of the Ethereum Foundation, was successfully deployed on the Ethereum mainnet. It is positioned as an infrastructure-level discovery and reputation standard for AI agents. The standard aims to establish a unified identity and reputation foundation for AI agents at the public chain level and plans to expand to mainstream L2s, connecting the currently fragmented agent ecosystem. As the prototype of a trustless agent economy emerges, a new question arises: when AI agents begin to make decisions and execute instructions for people and organizations, should trust still be determined by traditional centralized platforms, or should it be returned to open on-chain rules and public standards?

AI Agents' Silence: The Real Dilemma of Cross-Platform Collaboration

● The issue of identity fragmentation: Currently, most AI agents are encapsulated within their respective platforms, cloud services, or internal corporate systems. The same agent often exists in different organizations and applications under different accounts, API keys, or internal IDs, lacking a unified, cross-domain verifiable identity. As a result, when an agent needs to serve the same user or organization in multiple scenarios, it is challenging to prove "it is itself," and past records cannot be smoothly migrated and inherited between systems.

● The cage of platform reputation: Traditional platform-based reputation systems typically rely on a single company's account system and closed-source algorithms, locking behavior data, ratings, and violation records firmly within their own databases. Whether it is the "trusted agent" label from cloud vendors or the "safety score" from large model platforms, they essentially only function within that ecosystem, making it difficult to verify their basis externally and to seamlessly utilize this data for broader risk control or collaborative design.

● The contradiction of security and cost in multi-agent collaboration: For developers and organizations, once multi-agent collaboration and cross-platform calls are involved, integration, permission verification, and risk assessment need to be conducted separately on each platform, repeatedly building whitelists, blacklists, and audit logic. This not only incurs high integration costs but also easily leads to a "security shortfall effect." A failure in the centralized identity and reputation gatekeeping of any link may collapse the entire agent invocation chain, yet it is difficult to share defensive experiences across different systems.

On-Chain Discovery and Reputation: ERC-8004 Attempts to Give Agents a "Global ID Card"

● A unified verifiable identity on-chain discovery mechanism: The core of ERC-8004 is to provide AI agents with an on-chain discovery layer based on Ethereum, allowing agents to register on-chain, expose key metadata, and be discovered and referenced by different applications through standard interfaces. Developers and organizations can establish a unified identity for agents without relying on any single platform's account system, and any participant supporting the standard can verify "which agent this is, who operates it, and what declared capabilities it has" against the on-chain records.

● De-platformed reputation accumulation: On this basis, ERC-8004 allows parts of the agent's behavior, interaction results, and third-party evaluations to be accumulated on-chain, gradually forming a traceable reputation trajectory. Compared to centralized platforms that label and score using black-box algorithms, this on-chain reputation is closer to a "public ledger": who gave what kind of trust or warning at what time can be independently verified by other participants, enabling them to make their own risk judgments and authorization decisions without relying on a single trust intermediary.

● Signals of a new phase narrative: Media such as Planet Daily have commented that this action "marks a new phase in the infrastructure construction of Ethereum in the AI + blockchain intersection." Following the DeFi and NFT standards, Ethereum is beginning to attempt to provide underlying protocol support for new participants like AI agents. This is not just a technical upgrade but also a struggle for discourse power over "who defines the reputation and identity of agents," raising the narrative tension across the entire field.

From Single Chain to Multi-L2: How Trustless Agents Can Freely Migrate Between Rollups

● Mainnet launch and multi-L2 planning: Currently, ERC-8004 has completed its standard deployment on the Ethereum mainnet, becoming an infrastructure that can be called and integrated. According to information from the Ethereum Foundation, the standard plans to expand to mainstream L2s in the future to facilitate broader implementation in the rollup ecosystem. However, there is currently no clear public timeline for which L2s will be chosen and in what order, and the related roadmap is still in a dynamic planning stage.

● Imagination of cross-rollup migration of reputation and identity: Once the multi-L2 deployment is rolled out, AI agents can theoretically "carry" their on-chain identity and reputation records between different rollups and upper-layer applications. For example, an agent that has been executing arbitrage and liquidation tasks stably in a certain DeFi ecosystem may be directly recognized and granted a higher initial trust limit on another L2, without needing to start from scratch to "build reputation," thus forming a portable system similar to "on-chain credit."

● Unified standards reduce integration friction: For organizations that need to build agent collaboration networks across organizations and platforms, a unified discovery and reputation standard means fewer rounds of custom integration. As long as they connect to the ERC-8004 interface, they can reuse the same identity and reputation logic across different L2s and applications, reducing redundant security audits and access development costs, allowing more resources to be invested in strategy design and business innovation rather than in underlying trust glue engineering.

Ethereum Foundation Bets on AI Intersection: Open Standards Against Closed Cloud Solutions

● Infrastructure actions led by the Foundation's AI head: ERC-8004 is not a scattered community proposal but is personally led by Davide Crapis, the AI head of the Ethereum Foundation, which means it is positioned as a foundational project in the "AI + chain" direction rather than an application layer experiment. The Foundation's choice to deploy this standard on the mainnet at this moment is itself a public narrative: AI agents will not just be application layer tools but will become first-class citizens in the future Ethereum ecosystem.

● Open on-chain standards against closed cloud solutions: In the narrative competition of AI + chain, another path comes from large cloud platforms and model service providers, which tend to build closed "agent clouds" around their own computing power, models, and data. In contrast, Ethereum bets on open standards represented by ERC-8004, using composable and verifiable public protocols to carry agent identity and reputation, allowing different developers and platforms to collaborate under the same rules rather than being locked within the ecosystem walls of a single cloud vendor.

● The multi-party game of reputation data and governance rights: As standards like ERC-8004 are rolled out, the game surrounding the ownership of reputation data, revenue distribution, and governance rights will gradually come to the forefront. On one side is the Ethereum Foundation, which holds resources and narratives, and on the other side are the platform parties that control user and computing power access, along with developers who write frameworks and tools, and operators who actually run, train, and tune the agents. Who has the right to decide which reputations are put on-chain, how they are valued, and who can modify the rules will become the core conflict point in future governance and benefit distribution.

From Standards to Ecosystem: The Trust Landscape Imagination After ERC-8004

Currently, the biggest uncertainty surrounding ERC-8004 is whether real business scenarios and developer adoption can keep pace with the speed of the standard's release. The standard itself can be deployed on the mainnet within a day, but getting organizations to expose agent identities and some behaviors on the public ledger and rely on on-chain reputation for decision-making in actual production environments requires a long cycle of risk assessment, regulatory communication, and business model validation.

From the perspective of information disclosure, there is still a lack of complete public data regarding the scale of the testnet, and the final technical design details of the verification registry and the clear roadmap for the landing rhythm of each L2 are not visible. This means that observers find it difficult to judge the actual penetration speed based solely on the standard's launch, and it is even harder to simply use a "growth curve" to narrate the explosive story of the agent economy.

However, looking at it from a longer cycle, once a portable reputation system similar to ERC-8004 is widely adopted in the Ethereum and its L2 ecosystem, the AI agent economy may reshape the existing "trust as a service" industry landscape. Services traditionally monopolized by centralized institutions, such as identity verification, risk control scoring, and compliance auditing, may gradually transform into public infrastructure governed by open standards and multi-party participation, truly turning "trust" from an asset of a few platforms into a protocol layer resource that can circulate across ecosystems.

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