Agent Passports Engraved on Blockchain
In an instant, we've arrived at a world where AI agents write code, review contracts, and trade stocks. But these agents lack identification. There's no way to verify who created them, what their past actions were, or whether they can be trusted. A ballroom where billions of people trade under masks. This is the state of the agent economy in 2026. A world of capable, yet anonymous beings. This isn't a problem of technology, but of civilization.
One of the latest approaches to solving this problem is the Ethereum standard called ERC-8004. Engineers from MetaMask, the Ethereum Foundation, Google, and Coinbase are co-authors. It's like having Visa, central banks, Google, and passport issuing agencies all sitting at the same table. Why did they come together? They recognized that if they built independently, it would be a losing game for everyone. The agent economy requires a neutral technological infrastructure, unowned by any single company, and the only way to meet this requirement is through blockchain.
ERC-8004 consists of three registries: The Identity Registry is the agent's birth certificate. The Reputation Registry is a credit rating—not a simple star rating. The Validation Registry is a court of law. It provides three levels of verification: reputation-based, staking, and zkML/TEE, depending on the risk of the task.
Looking more broadly, a single timeline emerges: Agent's Capability Declaration (MCP) → Agent's Common Language (A2A) → Agent's Currency (x402) → Agent's Citizenship (ERC-8004). This is similar to the order in which humans created language, currency, and laws. The difference is that this is happening in 18 months, not tens of thousands of years.
Of course, the picture isn't entirely rosy. Sybil attack defenses are unresolved, payment integration isn't part of the spec, and the developer experience is still rough. Agents themselves still struggle with complex tasks. One could argue that it's like issuing a driver's license to a toddler. However, roads are always laid before cars. Infrastructure comes before apps—a pattern that has been repeated without exception throughout technological history.
The agent society is coming. That society needs birth registration, a credit system, and courts. The first draft of that constitution is being written right now on Ethereum.
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