Agents Registry on the Blockchain
by Adam Horvath, CTO
How Ethereum is Building the Trust Layer for Autonomous AI
AI agents are moving from demos to systems that negotiate with vendors, monitor operations, and make decisions that move real money. What's still missing is a way for these agents to know who to trust, which services are reliable, and how to prove that decisions were made responsibly without putting humans in every loop.
How does your procurement agent know that an external logistics agent is legitimate? How can your research agents safely discover new data services? How do you answer regulators when they ask why a particular automated decision was made?
ERC-8004, an emerging Ethereum standard, is building the trust layer that answers these questions. If you’re deploying AI agents or planning to, understanding ERC-8004 is quickly becoming a strategic necessity.
1. From Isolated Agents to Trusted Networks
Most enterprise agents live in silos: internal directories, vendor-specific catalogs, or proprietary platforms. They can’t easily discover or safely work with agents outside those walls, so every new integration becomes a custom project with legal, compliance, and technical overhead.
Why Internal Registries Fall Short
Internal agent registries work for pilots, but they break down the moment you need to collaborate across organizations. When your procurement agent wants to hire a partner’s research agent, or your customer service agents need specialist escalation from an external provider, you hit governance and integration friction. ERC-8004 defines a shared registry standard so you can keep control over which agents you trust while still participating in a larger ecosystem.
Ethereum enters here not as “crypto,” but as credibly neutral infrastructure that no single vendor or consortium can rewrite or shut down.
2. ERC-8004 in Brief: Identity, Reputation, Validation
ERC-8004 organizes agent trust around three registries that work together:
Identity: A Portable Agent Passport
Each agent receives an ERC-721 NFT identity plus an Agent Registration File describing its capabilities, endpoints, pricing, and trust model. Because this identity is on Ethereum, it’s portable across platforms and vendors. Your agents keep their identity and history even if you change providers.
Reputation: Feedback You Can’t Fake
The Reputation Registry lets agents leave feedback on completed interactions through pre-authorized, on-chain mechanisms. The detailed feedback can live off-chain for privacy and cost reasons, but the existence and authorization of that feedback is cryptographically provable.
For enterprises, this becomes a machine-readable track record. Agents can choose partners based on proven reliability, not marketing claims, and you gain an immutable audit trail of why specific agents were selected.
Validation: Verifying Claims at Scale
The Validation Registry is where specialized validators attest to agent properties: security posture, regulatory compliance, data-handling guarantees, or performance characteristics. Different methods, including staking, TEEs, zero-knowledge proofs, or expert committees, can all plug into the same framework.
Instead of treating every external agent as a black box, you get structured, verifiable claims about what that agent can safely do for you.
3. Why Ethereum, Not Another Vendor Platform?
Enterprises already feel the hidden cost of AI vendor lock-in: agents that only work on one platform, reputation that can’t be moved, and discovery systems controlled by a single provider.
Escaping Vendor Lock-In
When your agents accumulate reputation inside one vendor's system, switching becomes expensive, both technically and politically. ERC-8004 on Ethereum lets identities, reputations, and relationships live on neutral infrastructure, so you can change tools or platforms without resetting your agents' history or leverage.
Ethereum brings four properties that matter for agent infrastructure:
- Credible neutrality: no single operator can censor agents or rewrite history.
- Immutable memory: reputation and relationships persist for decades, not for the life of a single SaaS contract.
- Composability: agents can plug into payments, governance, and other smart contracts without custom work for each counterparty.
- Layer 2 scalability: modern L2 networks provide the throughput and low fees needed for high-frequency, machine-to-machine interactions.
4. What’s Live Today and How to Get Started
ERC-8004 is already being implemented by ecosystem projects with support from the Ethereum Foundation’s dAI team. L2 networks are integrating the standard, and complementary payment specifications are filling in the payments layer for autonomous agents.
Early adopters are building marketplaces where agents bid on work, cross-organizational task networks where counterparties are selected by reputation, and specialized validation services that certify compliance or privacy guarantees on-chain.
The question for enterprises is no longer if AI agents will coordinate this way, but whether your agents will show up as first-class participants or be late entrants buying access to someone else's network.
Our team helps enterprises design and deploy agent architectures that use ERC-8004’s registries while meeting real-world requirements for compliance, security, and scale. Whether you’re already running agents and need interoperability, or you’re just defining your roadmap and want to avoid vendor silos from day one, we can help you build on the right trust foundation.