ERC-8004 Set to Enable Trustless AI Agents on Ethereum Mainnet
An Ethereum smart contract standard designed to enable trustless communication between artificial intelligence agents, ERC-8004, is expected to deploy to mainnet on Thursday, according to Marco De Rossi, head of AI at MetaMask. In a message posted Monday on a developer Telegram channel, De Rossi said development had been “frozen” and that the team would move to mainnet “probably around Thursday, 9 AM ET.” On Tuesday, the official Ethereum account on X said the protocol would go live on mainnet “soon.”
ERC-8004 introduces a standard method for registering and verifying AI agents. It supports agent discovery and portable reputation, allowing agents to interact across organizations without centralized intermediaries. The standard can be integrated directly into smart contracts and does not require changes to the Ethereum network.
The proposal states that the protocol is intended to enable the discovery, selection, and interaction with agentic AI across organizational boundaries without pre-existing trust, facilitating open agent economies on-chain.
Agentic AI economy slated for Ethereum
The standard addresses two main challenges: how to locate AI agents and how to determine their reliability. Existing tools such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Agent2Agent support communication, capability advertising, and task coordination, but do not solve discovery or trust.
On Tuesday, Davide Crapis, AI lead at the Ethereum Foundation, said Ethereum is well positioned to secure and settle AI-to-AI interactions, noting that ERC-8004 is coming to mainnet. He shared the update on January 27, 2026.
Interoperability for AI services without gatekeepers
Developers on Telegram said the standard will also be supported on the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, though no timeframe was provided. Base uses x402, an open payment protocol developed by Coinbase and introduced in May 2025, which enables instant, automated stablecoin payments over HTTP so AI agents can pay for services autonomously.
The launch of ERC-8004 provides the missing functionality for AI agents to operate as economic participants rather than siloed tools. The official Ethereum account on X said this “unlocks a global market where AI services can interoperate without gatekeepers.”
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