Written by: ZHIXIONG PAN

During the Ethereum Devconnect, an event called Trustless Agent Day gathered the leading thinkers at the intersection of Web3 and AI. This closing panel was hosted by Tina from Flashbots, with core guests including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Davide Crapis, head of the dAI team at the Ethereum Foundation.

This dialogue was not only about technical standards but also a projection of the future architecture of the digital society: when AI agents become the main participants in economic activities, what kind of infrastructure, trust models, and privacy protections do we need?

The Dual Walls of Infrastructure: Payment and Discovery (x402 and ERC-8004)

The conversation began with two core protocols: x402 for payments and ERC-8004 for service discovery, which together form the foundation of the agent economy.

Vitalik's Vision for Micropayments Reconstruction

Vitalik first expressed his excitement about micropayments in the AI era. He believes that AI's involvement makes micropayments truly feasible. In the human world, deciding "whether to pay 4 cents or 11 cents for this service" is not only time-consuming but also a heavy cognitive burden. However, for AI agents, this is a millisecond-level computational decision.

Vitalik emphasized that "pay for what you consume" is the most efficient economic model. However, he also pointed out that such high-frequency payments must be built on privacy protection. Without safeguards, an agent's thousands of query records would completely expose user behavior patterns. Therefore, integrating ZK (zero-knowledge proof) technology is crucial, allowing users to prepay a sum (like $5) in exchange for proof of 5000 queries, where these 5000 queries are unlinkable on-chain.

Davide and ERC-8004: From Payment to Trust

If x402 addresses the question of "how to pay," Davide's ERC-8004 attempts to solve the question of "who to pay." Davide noted that when he saw people starting to send micropayments to web services or AI via x402, a fundamental question arose: how do you trust these services?

Thus, ERC-8004 (Trustless Agent Standard) was born. It is not a simple whitelist but a decentralized service discovery mechanism. It allows service providers to register and showcase their capabilities on-chain. Davide categorized trust into two types:

• Soft Trust: Based on past performance, reputation accumulation, and audit results.
• Hard Trust: Based on cryptographic proofs or guarantees from cryptoeconomics.

ERC-8004 standardized the interaction format of this information, enabling agents to autonomously search for and verify service providers in a decentralized network.

The Elephant in the Room: The Gap Between Ideal and Reality

Before discussing the future, host Tina handed the microphone to the audience to initiate a discussion on "finding the elephant in the room," referring to those obvious yet overlooked industry pain points.

The "Role-Playing" Crisis of Agents

Developer Shaw raised a sharp point: we do not yet have truly usable agents. He pointed out that current agents are mostly trained on text data from platforms like Reddit; they know "the theoretical steps to make a cake" but have never "baked a cake" in the real world. Current agents attempting to trade or predict markets are operating "out of distribution." To some extent, the current industry is engaging in an expensive LARP (live-action role-playing), lacking agents with genuine end-to-end execution capabilities.

The Double Whammy of Cost and Bias

Another developer, Tim, pointed out the unsustainability of the economic model: the reasoning costs are too high. Each small decision call burns through funds, and to realize the vision of x402, the cost per decision must be reduced to below 10% of transaction fees. Currently, many startups are merely surviving on the free quotas provided by cloud service providers.

Additionally, Andrew Miller poured cold water on reputation systems, arguing that history shows reputation systems often favor incumbents and are prone to failure. He suggested that the only solution might be to use TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) sandboxes, allowing open-source agents to enter the sandbox to assess the security of closed-source agents.

Why Blockchain? The Native Habitat of Agents

Given the multitude of issues, why do we insist on building the agent economy on blockchain? Vitalik and Davide provided answers that go beyond "payment tools."

On-chain Games and Synthetic Assets

Vitalik offered an interesting perspective: blockchain is the natural soil for on-chain games, where "games" refer to market interactions in the sense of game theory.

He believes that agents do not need to establish trust through identity verification like humans; they are better suited to game in an anonymous, trustless environment. More importantly, agents can understand and handle extremely complex synthetic assets—financial products composed of a basket of commodities that are difficult for humans to intuitively grasp but make sense to machine logic. This could give rise to a market for agents that is entirely different from human financial markets.

Constrained Delegation

Davide added from a security perspective that blockchain provides "hard rules." As humans delegate more decision-making power to AI (i.e., agentification), we need a safety valve. Smart contracts can implement constrained delegation; for example, I allow my DeFi agent to move funds for arbitrage, but the underlying smart contract code explicitly prohibits withdrawals to external addresses. This code-based constraint offers a level of security that traditional Web2 APIs cannot provide.

Privacy as a "Hygiene Habit"

On the topic of privacy, Vitalik put forth a core assertion: privacy is not a feature but a hygiene habit.

He emphasized that we should not view privacy as a new gimmick added to products but rather as "not leaking data anymore."

User Privacy > Service Privacy

Regarding the priority of privacy protection, Vitalik was clear: user privacy is far more important than service privacy. We do not want to live in a world where users are scored and tracked, but we need service providers (agents) to have publicly transparent reputation records. He even envisioned using ZK technology to achieve "negative reputation proof"—users could prove their interaction history (including records of negative reviews) without exposing their specific identity, thus maintaining system integrity while protecting privacy.

How to Scale Privacy: TEE and Anonymization

Faced with the performance bottleneck of ZK in reasoning power, the discussion pointed to TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) as a pragmatic solution. Although it increases hardware costs, it serves as a bridge connecting reality and ideals. Vitalik added that, in addition to hardware-level protection, anonymization is another underestimated direction. By obscuring the source of requests through mix-nets, even if the content cannot be fully encrypted, it can significantly protect users from targeted analysis.

The Future Computing Landscape: The Disappearance of Laptops?

Looking ahead to the infrastructure of the next 5 to 10 years, Vitalik made a futuristic prediction: laptops may disappear.

He believes that the current computing architecture has a fundamental economic contradiction: while local-first is the most trustworthy, it is extremely inefficient in terms of computing resource utilization (personal needs are pulsed, and idle hardware not only wastes costs but also requires charging).

The future trend is the decoupling of computing and user interface (UI). With the proliferation of smartphones, smart glasses, smartwatches, and even brain-computer interfaces, the form of UI will become extremely fragmented, while the computing core may separate from personal terminals.

This raises a huge unresolved question: we need a new operating system or underlying architecture that allows users to securely use remote computing power while still maintaining a trust level akin to "local execution."

From Protocol to Application

At the end of the dialogue, Davide revealed that ERC-8004 will soon go live on the Ethereum mainnet in a few weeks. For him, the past few months have been "Season 1," the phase where the community gathered and established standards; the next phase will enter "Season 2": improving infrastructure (such as browsers and SDKs) and incubating killer applications.

Vitalik provided specific advice: if you want to create a "trustless" product in the AI field, real-time translation is a perfect entry point. While current encrypted communication software protects transmission privacy, translation functions often rely on centralized cloud services, which is the biggest gap in the privacy protection chain.

This panel was not only a technical evangelism for ERC-8004 and x402 but also a profound discussion on how to preserve a degree of sovereignty and privacy for humanity through cryptography and decentralized networks in an era of rapid AI development.

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