ERC-8004 ‘Agents’ Standard Nears Mainnet as Ethereum Teases Rollout

• Ethereum’s official X account said ERC-8004 is going live on mainnet “soon,” promoting it as a way to help AI agents discover each other.
• MetaMask AI lead Marco De Rossi said development is “frozen” and a mainnet deployment is “probably” midweek, citing Thursday around 9 a.m. ET as a target window.
• ERC-8004 is a draft application-layer standard, not an Ethereum protocol upgrade.

Ethereum is signaling a near-term rollout of ERC-8004 , a draft standard that proposes a shared framework for AI agents to prove identity claims, accumulate reputation, and request validation using the network as a neutral reference layer.

In a Jan. 27 post on X, the blockchain’s official account said “ERC-8004 is going live on mainnet soon,” framing the standard as a way to enable agent discovery and portable credibility across platforms without centralized intermediaries.

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ERC-8004 Nears Mainnet, But It Isn’t A Network Upgrade

ERC-8004 is not an Ethereum hard fork, and it does not change Ethereum’s consensus rules.

It is a standards-track ERC, meaning it defines application-layer interfaces and data formats that developers can implement in smart contracts and tooling.

That makes the phrase “going live on mainnet” easy to misunderstand.

In practice, a “mainnet launch” typically means:

• the ERC-8004 registry contracts are deployed to Ethereum mainnet,
• addresses are published for developers to integrate,
• indexers and explorers begin tracking agent identities and trust signals.

On the ERC-8004 page, the proposal is labeled Draft and Standards Track: ERC, with a created date of 2025-08-13.

The author list includes Marco De Rossi and Davide Crapis, alongside contributors with Google and Coinbase email addresses shown in the document metadata.

The proposal also lists required standards: EIP-155 (chain identifiers), EIP-712 (typed signatures), EIP-721 (NFT-style identities), and EIP-1271 (smart contract signature verification).

Community signals suggest the rollout could happen as early as Thursday, Jan. 29, but confirmation will come from on-chain deployments.

The Ethereum Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

What ERC-8004 Actually Standardizes

ERC-8004 aims to standardize a basic “trust layer” for agents, especially for scenarios where agents interact across different companies and ecosystems.

The proposal defines three lightweight on-chain registries: identity, reputation, and validation.

Identity: Agents as ERC-721 IDs

The identity component treats agents as ERC-721 identities, where each agent is represented by a token ID in a registry.

Metadata is pointed to via an “agentURI,” which can describe services, endpoints, and capabilities off-chain.

This design makes agents indexable in familiar Ethereum tooling. It also makes identity portable in a way that works across apps.

Reputation: Portable Feedback, With Spam Risks

The reputation layer standardizes how clients can publish feedback about an agent and how others can query it.

That portability is the point: a reputation signal should be reusable across marketplaces and platforms.

The trade-off is predictable. If anyone can post feedback, then reputation becomes vulnerable to low-quality inputs and Sybil activity.

The proposal explicitly warns that consumers should filter reputation sources rather than treating raw signals as authoritative.

Validation: A Hook for “Proof the Work Happened”

The third layer, validation, is meant for cases where “reputation” is not enough.

It defines a way for agents to request validation and receive responses from validators, which could represent many approaches, from crypto-economic checks to cryptographic attestations.

ERC-8004 does not mandate a single validation method. It standardizes the interface so different validation markets can plug in.

Why This Matters Now

AI agents are moving from experiments to systems that touch real-world value: payments, data access, and automated decision-making.

Designers built most trust models for humans. They assume slow-moving identity, institutional accountability, and legible intent.

Agent-to-agent interaction breaks those assumptions. It scales faster, routes around organizational boundaries, and often operates through APIs and wallets rather than contracts and signatures on paper.

ERC-8004’s bet is that Ethereum can act as a neutral coordination layer for this shift.

It offers a shared format for identity and trust signals while leaving most compute and interaction off-chain.

Supporters have framed this as an expansion of Ethereum’s role beyond finance and toward infrastructure for interoperable AI services.