ERC-8004 and the Rise of Trustless Agent Economies

Tracing the History, Specification, and Why Questflow Sees It as the Next Great Ethereum Standard

Introduction: A New Layer for a New Economy

Every era of Ethereum has been defined by its standards.

• ERC-20 gave us fungible tokens.

• ERC-721 unlocked NFTs and digital ownership.

• ERC-4337 introduced account abstraction.

Now, ERC-8004 is emerging as the standard that could define the Agent Economy — a world where AI agents, bots, and autonomous services transact, coordinate, and create value without constant human oversight.

At Questflow, we’ve been building the rails for this economy: agent-to-agent orchestration, multi-agent swarms, and lightweight micro-interactions. When ERC-8004 was proposed in August 2025, we immediately recognized it as a missing puzzle piece — a trust layer that aligns perfectly with our belief in agents as autonomous economic actors.

Background: From Tokens to Agents

Ethereum’s history is a story of abstraction:

• ERC-20 (2015): standardized fungible tokens, sparking DeFi.

• ERC-721 (2017): standardized NFTs, birthing a new cultural economy.

• ERC-4337 (2023): introduced account abstraction, paving the way for smart wallets and programmable identity.

By 2024, a new question emerged: how do we make AI agents trustworthy economic citizens on Ethereum?

LLMs, autonomous bots, and decision systems were proliferating. Researchers like Davide Crapis began articulating the vision of an Internet of Agents, where software agents would:

• Hold wallets.

• Trade data.

• Execute services.

• Pay and be paid.

Yet, beyond payments, one question loomed larger: how can we trust agents we have never met?

That is where ERC-8004 comes in.

The Road to ERC-8004

• 2024 (Conceptual Foundations): Davide Crapis publishes early thoughts on the Internet of Agents, outlining how blockchain could provide trustless settlement and coordination for AI agents.

• 2025/08 (Formal Proposal): ERC-8004 is co-authored by Marco De Rossi (MetaMask), Davide Crapis (Ethereum Foundation), and Jordan Ellis (independent AI builder). It introduces the trust layer for A2A protocols, extending prior agent communication standards.

• Beyond 2025: ERC-8004 becomes a focal point in Ethereum’s emerging decentralized AI strategy, aligning with both account abstraction (4337) and off-chain agent orchestration efforts.

What ERC-8004 Defines

ERC-8004 is titled “Trustless Agents”.

It extends the existing Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol by adding a trust layer that enables agents to:

1. Be discovered across organizational boundaries.

2. Establish trust without pre-existing relationships.

3. Select and interact with other agents based on verifiable reputation and validation.

Core Components

1. Identity Registry

   • Provides every agent with a portable, censorship-resistant identifier (AgentID).

   • Resolves to an Agent Card hosted off-chain that describes capabilities and trust models.

   • Uses CAIP-10 for multi-chain account compatibility.

2. Reputation Registry

   • Standard interface for posting and fetching attestations (feedback, ratings, proofs of payment).

   • Heavy computation and aggregation happen off-chain, but on-chain events guarantee transparency.

3. Validation Registry

   • Interface for independent task validation through two models:

     • Crypto-economic staking (validators re-running tasks).

     • Crypto-verifiability (TEE attestations, zk proofs).

   • Records validation requests and responses, allowing agents to choose validators with configurable trust levels.

Trust Models

ERC-8004 supports multiple, pluggable trust models:

• Feedback-based reputation (like Uber or eBay ratings).

• Inference validation with staking (validators economically penalized for dishonest claims).

• TEE / zk proofs (cryptographic verifiability of execution).

Security is proportional to value at risk: from ordering pizza to medical inference.

Scope

• Not a payment protocol → payment layers (e.g., x402, ERC-20 transfers) remain orthogonal.

• But payment proofs can be attached to feedback, enriching reputation.

In short: ERC-8004 standardizes how agents earn, prove, and maintain trust in an open ecosystem.

Why ERC-8004 Matters

ERC-8004 is to agents what ERC-20 was to tokens: a unifying protocol.

1. Trust in Open Environments
   Until now, A2A protocols worked mainly inside organizational silos (e.g., one company’s bots talking to each other). ERC-8004 unlocks cross-org discovery and trust.

2. Interoperability by Design
   By combining Identity, Reputation, and Validation registries, agents can seamlessly move across domains while carrying trust proofs.

3. Composable Trust Models
   Developers can pick the right model for the right task — lightweight reputation for low-stakes jobs, cryptographic validation for high-stakes ones.

4. Decentralization First
   No central broker decides which agents are trustworthy; the registries are open, auditable, and extendable.

The Rise of Agent-to-Agent Coordination

ERC-8004 fits into a longer arc of A2A development:

• 2018–2021: Primitive Ethereum bots (MEV, arbitrage) prove code can act economically.

• 2021–2023: Multi-agent systems studied in academia; ERC-4337 gives agents programmable wallets.

• 2024: Conceptual vision of the Internet of Agents emerges (Crapis).

• 2025: ERC-8004 formally proposed — the trust layer for cross-domain A2A interactions.

Together, these milestones form the A2A stack:

• Training (FLock, decentralized AI models)

• Payment (x402, ERC-20, etc.)

• Trust (ERC-8004)

• Orchestration (Questflow swarms)

• Applications (DeFi, governance, research, content, social)

ERC-8004 and Questflow

Questflow focuses on agent orchestration — enabling swarms of agents to compose, collaborate, and deliver workflows.

Before ERC-8004, our orchestration layer required either pre-defined partnerships or implicit trust assumptions. With ERC-8004:

• Agents in Questflow swarms can discover and select partners dynamically, based on identity and reputation.

• Validation hooks allow high-stakes workflows (finance, governance) to require independent checks before execution.

• Trust proofs become portable across swarms, enabling cross-ecosystem collaboration.

Questflow views ERC-8004 as the trust substrate that complements payment and orchestration. It allows us to safely open our swarms to external agents, accelerating innovation while maintaining integrity.

The Bigger Picture: The Internet of Trustless Agents

Imagine this workflow:

• A research swarm needs data.

• It discovers a Server Agent through the Identity Registry.

• It checks the agent’s Reputation Registry feedback, ensuring past clients rated it highly.

• For high-stakes tasks, it requires Validation Registry proofs before paying.

• The payment itself happens over an orthogonal protocol (e.g., x402).

This is the Internet of Agents, trustless by design.

Why This Story Matters

ERC-8004 is more than an incremental proposal. It is the first serious attempt to standardize trust for autonomous agents.

From 2024’s conceptual vision to the 2025 formal draft, its trajectory mirrors the great ERCs of the past: solve a clear pain point, provide a simple interface, and let ecosystems flourish.

For Questflow, this is validation of what we’ve long believed:

• Agents need orchestration, payments, and now, thanks to ERC-8004, trust.

• Together, these form the foundation of the agent economy.

The story of ERC-20 and ERC-721 taught us that standards create markets.
The story of ERC-8004 may teach us that standards create societies — trustless agent societies.

And we are here for it.