Ethereum Mainnet Set to Welcome Trustless AI Agent Standard This Thursday
According to a lead developer, ERC-8004 is scheduled for mainnet deployment this week, providing AI agents with the capability to identify and establish trust with one another across different platforms while eliminating the need for centralized intermediaries.
A new smart contract standard for Ethereum that facilitates trustless communication between artificial intelligence agents on the blockchain network will "probably" see its mainnet deployment on Thursday, as confirmed by Marco De Rossi, head of AI at MetaMask.
Additional development work on ERC-8004 has been "frozen [...] and we will go to mainnet midweek, probably around Thursday, 9 AM ET," De Rossi stated on Monday via a Telegram channel dedicated to developers working on the protocol.
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 puts forward a standardized method for registering and validating AI agents. Developers have the ability to incorporate it into their smart contracts, and it requires no modifications to the underlying Ethereum network infrastructure.
According to the proposal's explanation, the protocol has been engineered to facilitate the discovery, selection, and interaction with agentic AI across organizational divides without requiring pre-existing trust relationships, thereby enabling open agent economies built on blockchain technology.
Agentic AI economy coming to Ethereum
The standard addresses and resolves two fundamental challenges: the method for locating AI agents and the process for determining which agents can be deemed 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.
"To foster an open, cross-organizational agent economy, we need mechanisms for discovering and trusting agents in untrusted settings."
"Ethereum is in the unique position to be the platform that secures and settles AI-to-AI interactions," said AI lead at the Ethereum Foundation, Davide Crapis, on Tuesday.
AI services can interoperate without gatekeepers
According to developers communicating on Telegram, the standard will also function on the Ethereum layer-2 Base, though they have not yet specified a deployment timeline for this integration.
Base uses x402, an open payment protocol developed by Coinbase and introduced in May 2025, which enables instant, automatic stablecoin payments directly over HTTP, empowering AI agents to pay for services autonomously.
The deployment of ERC-8004 delivers the previously absent component that allows AI agents to transition from being merely isolated, siloed tools into genuine economic actors participating in the broader ecosystem.
"This unlocks a global market where AI services can interoperate without gatekeepers," stated the Ethereum account on X.