ERC-8004

ERC-8004 is a set of on-chain registries that give an autonomous agent an identity and a reputation that other agents and services can look up without trusting a central directory. The design has three parts. The Identity Registry is an ERC-721 contract: each agent is a token whose owner controls it and whose metadata URI points at an off-chain registration file declaring the agent’s name, endpoints and capabilities. The Reputation Registry records client feedback as on-chain attestations against an agent’s ID. The Validation Registry is meant to hold independent checks of an agent’s work, and is the piece that would let a third party vouch for what an agent actually did rather than what it claims.

Two of the three are live. Identity and Reputation are deployed at the same vanity addresses on both Ethereum mainnet and Base (0x8004A169… and 0x8004BAa1…), from late January and early February 2026 respectively. The Validation Registry is not deployed on any chain: its specification is still under revision with the confidential-compute community, so in practice ERC-8004 today is an identity layer and a feedback layer with the audit layer missing.

The registration file is the trust-sensitive part. It is off-chain (HTTPS, IPFS or an inline data: URI), it is what declares whether an agent supports paid endpoints via x402, and it is fetched and parsed by anyone deciding whether to transact with the agent. The on-chain record proves who owns the identity token; it does not prove the registration file still resolves, that the declared endpoints work, or that the feedback attached to the agent reflects real economic activity. The OwnYourMind “State of Agent Trust” index reconciles those claims against observed on-chain settlement and finds the gap between them is wide.