# The State of Agent Trust > We indexed every agent on the two live ERC-8004 registries. Identity shipped. Reputation is thin, and three in four reputation-bearing agents show no on-chain settlement to back it. The numbers, with the scope. - Published: 2026-07-09 - Canonical: https://ownyourmind.ai/journal/state-of-agent-trust/ - Cite as: Own Your Mind (ownyourmind.ai), licence CC BY 4.0. Link the canonical URL. Charts and interactive widgets are omitted here; project data is at https://ownyourmind.ai/api/scores.json. --- We built an index of ERC-8004, the on-chain standard for agent identity and reputation, and pulled the record for every agent on the two live registries. As of 9 July 2026 that is 95,142 agents across Ethereum mainnet and Base. The identity layer works. The reputation layer mostly hasn't. Most agents carry no reputation, most of the reputation that exists has no on-chain settlement behind it, and one in six points at a registration file we can't even read. Every count below comes from the raw logs of the two registries, decoded and reconciled against USDC settlement on Base. None of it is a verdict on any single agent. It's what the chain says when you read all of it at once, with the coverage limits stated as we go. ## What ERC-8004 is meant to do ERC-8004 gives an autonomous agent an identity and a reputation that anyone can look up without trusting a central directory. It has three registries: 1. **Identity.** An NFT per agent. Its metadata points at an off-chain registration file that declares the agent's endpoints and capabilities. 2. **Reputation.** Client feedback, written on-chain as attestations. 3. **Validation.** Independent checks of what an agent actually did. Only two are live. Identity and Reputation deployed at matching addresses on mainnet and Base in late January and early February 2026. Validation isn't deployed on any chain, and the spec is still being revised. So the standard today is an identity layer and a feedback layer with the audit layer missing. That gap sets the ceiling on how far the other two can be trusted. ## The identity layer shipped Registration works. 95,142 agents exist on-chain, 36,482 on mainnet and 58,660 on Base, each a token with an owner and a metadata pointer. The contract enforces its core rule: an agent's owner can't post feedback on its own agent. We checked that against the spec and in the data. Registration is front-loaded. Mainnet took 22,695 registrations in its launch month of January 2026; Base took 21,641 in February. Both taper after the opening rush, the usual shape for a standard that early adopters pile into and then explore. Ownership is concentrated. One mainnet owner holds 2,663 agents, one Base owner holds 2,289, and several hundred owners on each chain hold more than five. Most owners hold one. A single wallet minting thousands of identities is the standard working as designed, but it makes agent count a weak proxy for how many people are actually here. ## Fifteen percent have no registration you can read We fetched the off-chain registration file for every agent that declared one. 14,953 agents, 15.7% of the total, have no valid file on record. | Fetch result | Agents | | - | - | | Valid file stored | 43,147 | | Host unreachable | 6,030 | | Invalid or unparseable JSON | 4,619 | | URI scheme we don't fetch | 3,284 | | Timed out | 519 | | Blocked by the SSRF guard | 432 | | Above the 256 KB cap | 69 | About 11,669 agents (12%) point at a file that is unreachable, times out, or won't parse. Another 3,284 use a URI scheme our fetcher doesn't cover, like DID, ENS or Arweave, so that slice is a limit of our reach rather than a dead agent. The other 43,147 are valid files we retrieved and stored. > **Fact:** 11,669 ERC-8004 agents point at a registration file that's unreachable or unparseable; another 3,284 use a scheme our fetcher doesn't cover. Together, 14,953 (15.7%) have no valid registration on record as of 9 July 2026. > > **Take:** This is the cost of putting a pointer on-chain and the payload off it. The identity token is permanent; the registration it references decays on the ordinary schedule of dead links, lapsed hosts and dropped IPFS pins. An agent you can't fetch is an agent you can't evaluate, and one in eight of them has already gone quiet. ## Reputation is thin, and it clusters Reputation is where the standard is supposed to earn trust, and it's mostly empty. The population thins fast as you raise the bar: - **Any feedback at all:** 32.6% of agents. On mainnet it's 4.5%; on Base, where most activity sits, 50%. - **Five or more entries:** 9,169 agents. - **Twenty or more:** 357. The feedback that does exist tends to cluster, in two patterns: - **Circular feedback, 409 agents.** Raters and rated are entangled, through reciprocal ratings or a shared funding source. One agent alone carries 112,534 reciprocal feedback entries from nine wallets. - **Burst feedback, 387 agents.** Most of the feedback lands inside a single hour, on an agent older than a day. The contract blocks an owner from rating its own agent, so this isn't crude self-rating. The rings route around the one rule it enforces. | Flag | Agents | What it marks | | - | - | - | | No settlement behind reputation | 6,925 | 5+ feedback, no observed Base USDC settlement | | No valid registration file | 14,953 | latest registration fetch failed | | Declares x402, no inbound USDC | 1,317 | claims a paid endpoint, none observed | | Circular feedback | 409 | reciprocal rings or shared funding | | Burst feedback | 387 | most feedback inside one hour | | Single-purpose raters | 46 | raters that rate only this agent | None of these flags is an accusation. Circular feedback has honest explanations, and the thresholds are deliberately conservative. The structural point stands, though: a reputation you can't reconcile against anything tells you nothing, and a meaningful share of the reputation here sits inside patterns a buyer should discount. ## The number that matters: reputation without settlement Take the agents that carry reputation, five feedback entries or more, and ask whether money actually moved for them. On Base, the chain with settlement data, 6,925 of 9,083 show no observed on-chain settlement. That is 76.2%. > **Fact:** Of the 9,083 Base agents with five or more feedback entries, 6,925 (76.2%) show no observed native-USDC settlement on their owner wallet after registration. > > **Take:** Reputation on this standard is largely decoupled from observed money. The scope is real, off-chain and undeclared-wallet payment is invisible to us, but even discounted heavily, a three-in-four gap says the feedback layer isn't yet backed by activity you can see. The scope carries weight here. We looked at native USDC settlement on Base, across each agent's owner wallet, after it registered. An agent paid through an undeclared wallet, in another token, on another chain, or off-chain would look settlement-free here even when it isn't. x402 makes it harder again: on-chain, an x402 payment is close to indistinguishable from an ordinary USDC transfer, so we read observed USDC flow, not provable revenue. The 76.2% says as much about our coverage as about the agents. The direction survives all of that. The feedback is on-chain; the money mostly isn't visible beside it. For a standard selling verifiable agent trust, that is the headline. ## Paid endpoints with no payments observed 1,317 agents declare in their registration file that they take x402 payments and show no observed inbound USDC on Base. Declaring a paid endpoint is cheap. Getting paid is an event. The spread between the two is one read on how much of the agent economy is live rather than staged. The declared capabilities point the same way. Agents declare plenty of surface: - **Web endpoint:** 9,397 agents - **MCP endpoint:** 5,180 - **Agent-to-agent:** 4,309 - **Agent wallet:** 1,716 Barely any of it shows up as settled activity in the window we can see. ## Position ERC-8004 shipped the easy layer and hasn't earned the hard one. Identity works: agents exist, they're owned, they're portable across two chains, and the contract holds its core rule. Reputation and validation are the parts that would make agent trust permissionless, and on the evidence they're thin, clustered, unreconciled, or in validation's case not deployed at all. The owner-side takeaway is simple. Don't trust an agent's reputation because it sits on-chain. On-chain makes a claim auditable, which is a long way short of true. A reputation you can reconcile against settlement is worth something. One you can't is a story with a hash on it. We publish the method with the numbers, thresholds and all, because a trust index you can't audit has the exact problem it's meant to solve. This is v0.1, scoped to what's observable on Base. Validation, when it deploys, could close the gap between what an agent claims and what it can prove. Until then, the identity holds and the trust is still mostly asserted. The other side of this is constructive. The same on-chain record that exposes the fakes also picks out the agents that stand up, and [four checks before you trust an agent](https://ownyourmind.ai/journal/four-checks-before-you-trust-an-agent/) sets out the short version you can run yourself. The record is on-chain for anyone to check. Most people won't. That's what the index is for. Live figures are on the [State of Agent Trust dashboard](https://ownyourmind.ai/agent-trust/).