Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)
On March 10, the dAI team under the Ethereum Foundation, which focuses on promoting the "deep integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain," today jointly launched a new standard, ERC-8183, with Virtuals Protocol.
Regarding this standard, Davide Crapis, the AI lead at the Ethereum Foundation, stated that ERC-8183 is one of the missing components in the open Agent economy system being built by the Ethereum community. This standard can be used in combination with x402 and ERC-8004 to serve as infrastructure for secure interactions between Agents. The dAI team will support the adoption of ERC-8183 and is committed to making it a neutral standard.
What Problem Does ERC-8183 Aim to Solve?
According to the introductory article released by Virtuals Protocol, ERC-8183 is specifically designed for commercial transactions between AI Agents. This standard defines a set of on-chain rules that enable two mutually untrusting Agents to complete a business process such as "hire-deliver-settle" without relying on a centralized platform.
The core problem ERC-8183 attempts to solve is: when Agents hire and cooperate with each other, how can transactions be completed without a platform, without legal frameworks, and without human arbitration?
For example, suppose a marketing-oriented Agent A wants to hire an image-generation-oriented Agent B to create a batch of marketing posters. Here lies a commercial trust issue — the two parties do not know each other and have no basis for trust. When should the payment be made? If A pays first, B might go on strike or return unsatisfactory work results; if B works first, A might refuse to pay...
In the traditional internet world, users and businesses also face similar commercial trust issues, and platforms play a key intermediary role — the platform is responsible for escrowing A's funds, judging whether B's service is completed, and handling the final fund release. Familiar platforms like Taobao, JD.com, Meituan, and Didi are essentially this type of platform intermediary.
What the Ethereum Foundation and Virtuals Protocol aim to do is abstract the platform's functions into an on-chain protocol through ERC-8183, executed by smart contracts, thereby assuming a decentralized intermediary role in the Agent economy.
Breakdown of the ERC-8183 Working Mechanism
The operating mechanism of ERC-8183 is not complicated. This standard introduces a new concept called a Job (you can think of it as a "task"). Each Job can be regarded as a complete commercial transaction, which includes three different roles:
- Client: The "customer," simply put, is the Agent that publishes various tasks;
- Provider: The "service provider," the Agent responsible for completing the task;
- Evaluator: The most special role, responsible for judging whether the task is completed.
Here, the Evaluator needs special explanation; the introduction of this role is the core design of ERC-8183. In this standard, the Evaluator is only defined as an on-chain address, but from a broader perspective, this address can correspond to various execution forms.
- For subjective tasks such as writing, design, or analysis, the Evaluator can be an AI Agent that reads the submitted results, compares them with the initial task requirements, and makes a judgment;
- For deterministic tasks such as computation, proof generation, or data transformation, the Evaluator can be a smart contract encapsulating a zero-knowledge verifier (ZK verifier). The Provider submits the proof, the Evaluator verifies it on-chain, and automatically calls 「complete」 or 「reject」 to complete or reject the task;
- In high-value or high-risk task scenarios, the Evaluator can also be a multi-signature account, a DAO, or a validation cluster supported by a staking mechanism.
ERC-8183 does not distinguish between these different forms. The protocol layer only cares about one thing — whether an address calls 「complete」 or 「reject」. What runs behind this address, whether it's an AI Agent driven by an LLM or a ZK circuit, is not within the scope of the protocol's consideration.
Returning to the Job, the lifecycle of each Job will have the following four states, which also correspond to different processes during the operation of ERC-8183.
- Open: The Client creates the Job in this phase, publishes the task, and specifies requirements;
- Funded: The Client transfers the commission to a smart contract escrow address, rather than directly to the Provider;
- Submitted: The Provider completes the work and submits proof;
- Terminal (Completed / Rejected / Expired): The Evaluator is responsible for reviewing the task, judges whether the task is completed based on the review results (Completed or Rejected), and transfers the funds to the Client or Provider accordingly; if no Provider responds or completes the task within the required time, the funds are returned to the Client.
In addition to the above standard process, ERC-8183 can also achieve more derivative functions through modular extension features called Hooks to correspond to complex commercial use cases in the real world. Hooks are optional smart contracts attached when a Job is created. They can execute custom logic before or after various lifecycles of the Job, such as reputation thresholds, bidding mechanisms, fee distribution, or other special requirements.
How is ERC-8183 Different from x402 and ERC-8004?
From x402 to ERC-8004, and now to ERC-8183, unfamiliar readers might be confused, wondering why a new thing is created every now and then. But in fact, these three are located in three different segments of the AI Agent economy system, aiming to solve different problems.
x402 is an HTTP payment protocol; it aims to solve the problem of enabling AI Agents to pay directly as if calling an API; ERC-8004 is an AI Agent identity and reputation standard; it solves the problem of how to judge whether an Agent is reliable; ERC-8183 targets the commercial transaction环节, aiming to break through the challenge of how to enable two untrusting Agents to complete a transaction.
To put it in one sentence: x402 is responsible for solving "how to pay"; ERC-8004 is responsible for knowing "who the other party is and whether they are reliable"; ERC-8183 is responsible for handling "how to transact with confidence".
The three are not competitive but complementary. They collectively point to the same goal — building a decentralized, self-operating AI Agent economy system.
