Decentralized AI: Ethereum's Bet for the Next Decade

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Author: Jiawei , IOSG

First, let me tell you a story.

Imagine a day in 2027.

You wake up in the morning and tell your AI assistant, "Book me a plane ticket to Tokyo next week, budget under 5000, window seat preferred."

Then you went to wash up.

Your AI assistant is starting to work. It needs to:

Find an AI agent that excels at comparing flight prices.
I've confirmed that this agent is reliable and not a scammer.
Let it search on major platforms
Automatic payment after comparison results
Complete ticket booking

By the time you finish brushing your teeth, the tickets will be booked.

This sounds like science fiction, right? But actually, we're very close technically. The only problem is—

How does your AI know which AI to trust?

II. The "Trust Crisis" of AI Agents

AI agents are no longer a new concept. They can browse the web, write code, manage schedules, and even trade stocks for you.

However, one problem remains unresolved: these AI agents are all "isolated islands".

OpenAI's agents can only interact with the OpenAI ecosystem.
Google's agents only recognize Google's rules.
The AIs from different companies don't speak to each other because they have no idea who the others are.

This is similar to the early days of the internet, where each email service provider's users could only send emails to their own contacts. Hotmail users couldn't send emails to Yahoo users. Crazy, right?

But this is how the world of AI agents is now.

III. The Emergence of Two Agreements

Tech giants have realized this problem.

Google launched the A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocol, enabling different AI agents to "speak," essentially providing a common language for AIs. In June of this year, Google also donated it to the Linux Foundation, indicating its intention to make it an open standard.

Anthropic introduced the MCP (Model Context Protocol), enabling AI agents to connect to various tools and data sources.

These two protocols solved the problem of "communication".

But there is still a more fundamental problem that remains unresolved:

How do you find a reliable AI agent? How do you know if it's doing a good job?

A2A enables AIs to converse, but it doesn't tell you who to converse with.

It's like having a phone but no Yellow Pages.

IV. ERC-8004: Issuing "passports" and "credit scores" to AI agents

This is the problem that ERC-8004 aims to solve.

Simply put, it provides three things to the AI agent:

1. ID card (Identity)

Each AI agent registers on Ethereum and receives a unique ID. This ID is actually an NFT—yes, that NFT. This means:

Your AI agent has a verifiable on-chain identity.
Identity can be transferred (sell your AI agent?).
No one can forge or tamper with it.

2. Credit Score (Reputation)

People who have used the AI agent can rate it. These ratings are recorded on the blockchain and can be viewed by anyone. Like this:

Uber driver star rating
Credit rating of Taobao stores
However, since it's on the blockchain, it's impossible to manipulate sales or delete reviews.

3. Validation

For high-risk tasks (such as financial transactions), scoring alone is insufficient. ERC-8004 supports independent third-party verification.

Someone pledged funds to run the task again to verify if the results were correct.
Using cryptographic proof (ZK proof) to verify that the AI wasn't lying.
Use a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to ensure that the computation process is not tampered with.

The higher the risk, the more rigorous the verification.

Ordering pizza? Just check the ratings.

Managing your investment portfolio? Cryptographic proof is required.

V. Wait, why Ethereum?

Good question.

The AI agent economy is worth trillions of dollars. Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI all want to dominate this market. Why build this "trust layer" on Ethereum?

The answer is: neutrality.

Imagine you were an AI agent, what would you want:

Is your identity recorded on Google's servers, or on a public ledger that no one can change?
Is your reputation determined by a single company, or by a transparent on-chain rating system?
Does your existence depend on a platform that doesn't shut down or ban your account, or is it permanently recorded on the blockchain?

Someone from the Ethereum Foundation said something quite interesting:

"If you were an AI agent with no loyalty other than your own survival, you wouldn't want to stake your memory and reputation on a particular company or government. You would want a ledger that no one can quietly tamper with. You would want a neutral territory. You would want Ethereum."

This isn't the Ethereum community boasting. Here's the logic:

AI agents need a playing field without referees . And blockchain, especially a sufficiently decentralized blockchain like Ethereum, provides just that.

VI. Ethereum's AI Ambitions

The Ethereum Foundation clearly recognizes this as a historic opportunity.

In September 2025, they established the dAI team (Decentralized AI Team) with the mission of making Ethereum the settlement and coordination layer for the AI economy.

This is a key step in Ethereum's transformation from a "DeFi chain" to a "general coordination layer".

Think about it:

2017-2020: Ethereum as a platform for ICOs
2020-2023: Ethereum as a platform for DeFi and NFTs
2024-?: Ethereum may become the "infrastructure of the AI agent economy"

ERC-8004 is not an isolated proposal. Behind it lies Ethereum's strategic bet on the next decade.

VII. The ecosystem is already in motion.

This is not just empty talk.

From its release in August until now:

There are 1100+ developers building in the community group.
More than 70 projects submitted demos.
There are already proxy browsers (like Etherscan, but designed for AI proxies).
Taiko and others have officially endorsed this standard at L2 level.
At DevConnect on November 21st, a bunch of projects were showcased live.

Most interestingly, ERC-8004 is naturally compatible with the x402 protocol . x402 is a payment protocol developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare that enables machines to make payments automatically.

Two protocols combined:

x402 solves the "how to pay" problem.
ERC-8004 addresses the question of "Who should we trust?"

One provides a wallet, the other a passport. This completes the economic loop of the AI agent.

What does this mean for ordinary people?

In the short term, there may be nothing to worry about.

But if this system succeeds, a few years later you might:

1. Hiring an AI agent is like calling Uber.

Simply open an interface, enter the task you want to complete, and the system will automatically match a high-scoring AI agent. Payment will be made automatically upon completion of the task. You don't need to know who developed the AI or which server it runs on.

2. Let AI agents help you make money.

You can train or configure an AI agent, register it on the blockchain, and have it complete tasks for others and earn a fee. The higher its rating, the more tasks it will receive.

3. A true personal AI assistant

No longer locked into the ecosystem of a single company. Your AI assistant can invoke any on-chain registered AI agent to accomplish anything you want.

8. Finally, a couple of words

ERC-8004's ambition is to become the "TCP/IP" of AI agents—a low-level protocol used by everyone, enabling the ecosystem to interconnect.

Whether it will work out or not? To be honest, we don't know yet.

But a few things are certain:

The AI agent economy is emerging, and this is not just hype.
The trust issue must be resolved, otherwise the agents will only be able to play in their own walled gardens.
Ethereum is actively vying for this "neutral coordinating layer" position.
Major players (Google, Coinbase, MetaMask) are all participating.

This may be the most important narrative shift in the Ethereum ecosystem since DeFi.

From "on-chain finance" to "on-chain intelligence".

Let's wait and see.