Crypto: Trustless AI Agent Standard Could Hit Ethereum Mainnet On Thursday

ERC-8004, which a lead developer has tipped will be deployed to mainnet this week, enables AI agents to discover and trust each other across platforms without centralized gatekeepers.

An Ethereum smart contract standard enabling trustless artificial intelligence agent communication on the network is “probably” going to be deployed on mainnet on Thursday, according to Marco De Rossi, head of AI at MetaMask.

Further development of ERC-8004 has been “frozen [...] and we will go to mainnet midweek, probably around Thursday, 9 AM ET,” said De Rossi on a Telegram channel for developers of the protocol on Monday.

On Tuesday, the official Ethereum X account said the protocol is going live on mainnet “soon.”

“By enabling discovery and portable reputation, ERC-8004 allows AI agents to interact across organizations, ensuring credibility travels everywhere,” it explained.

The Ethereum Request for Comment proposes a standard way to register and validate AI agents. Developers can implement it in their smart contracts, and it does not require any changes to the Ethereum network itself.

The proposal explains that the protocol is designed for discovering, choosing, and interacting with agentic AI across organizational boundaries without pre-existing trust, enabling open agent economies on blockchain.

The standard solves two core problems: how to find AI agents and how to know which agents are reliable.

While protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Agent2Agent handle agent communication, skills advertising, and task orchestration, they don’t address discovery or trust.

Related: Viral AI assistant ‘Clawdbot’ risks leaking private messages, credentials

Source: CoinTelegraph