ERC-8004 extends the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol by adding a trust layer that enables participants to discover, select, and interact with AI agents across organizational boundaries. It introduces three lightweight on-chain registries—Identity, Reputation, and Validation. While the technical design is relatively complete, several challenges remain for adoption and practical implementation:
To address this, we propose the “Let’s Build Trustless Agents (ERC-8004)” initiative, with the following goals:
Real Validation: Bring developers and project teams together to deeply study ERC-8004 and build on it, test its feasibility in real-world cases, and identify areas for improvement.
Identify Challenges: Launch challenges around core difficulties in implementing ERC-8004, encouraging developers to propose innovative solutions through hackathons.
Tooling Development: Create a mini grants pool (~$500 each, targeting $10k+ total) to push the best hackathon solutions toward MVP stage, building out SDKs, test frameworks, deployment tools, and other key components to lower the entry barrier.
Standard Improvement: Contribute feedback from practice back into the ERC-8004 specification, strengthening its role as infrastructure for Ethereum’s AI agent ecosystem.
This is not a one-off activity, but a long-term initiative to build the ERC-8004 ecosystem, with the ultimate goal of positioning Ethereum as the primary settlement and coordination layer for the AI agent economy.
The program **“**Let’s Build Trustless Agents (ERC-8004) ” will advance the standard through three phases: