Decentralized AI: Betting on Ethereum's Next Decade

1月 20, 2026 00:30:49

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Author: Jiawei, IOSG

1. Let’s Start with a Story

Imagine a day in 2027.

You wake up in the morning and tell your AI assistant, "Book me a flight to Tokyo next week, within a budget of 5000, and I want a window seat."

Then you go brush your teeth.

Your AI assistant starts working. It needs to:

Find an AI agent that specializes in flight price comparison
Confirm that this agent is reliable and not a scammer
Have it search across major platforms
Automatically make the payment after comparing the results
Complete the booking

By the time you finish brushing your teeth, the ticket is booked.

Sounds like science fiction, right? But technically, we are very close to this. The only question is------

How does your AI know which AI to trust?

2. 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 help you with stock trading.

But there’s a problem that hasn’t been solved: these AI agents are "islands."

OpenAI's agents can only interact within OpenAI's ecosystem
Google's agents only recognize Google's rules
AI from different companies don’t communicate with each other because they don’t even know who the others are

It’s like the early days of the internet, where users of each email service could only send emails to their own kind. Hotmail users couldn’t send emails to Yahoo users. Crazy, right?

But the world of AI agents is just like that now.

3. The Emergence of Two Protocols

Tech giants have realized this problem.

Google launched the A2A protocol (Agent-to-Agent), allowing different AI agents to "talk" to each other. It’s like giving AIs a common language. In June of this year, Google donated it to the Linux Foundation, indicating that they want to make it an open standard.

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

These two protocols solve the "communication" issue.

But there’s an even more fundamental problem that hasn’t been addressed:

How do you find a reliable AI agent? How do you know if it performs well?

A2A allows AIs to converse, but it doesn’t tell you who to talk to.

It’s like having a phone but no yellow pages.

4. ERC-8004: Issuing "Passports" and "Credit Scores" to AI Agents

This is the problem ERC-8004 aims to solve.

In simple terms, it provides three things for AI agents:

1. 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 identity on-chain
The identity can be transferred (sell your AI agent?)
No one can forge or tamper with it

2. Reputation

Users who have used the AI agent can rate it. These ratings are recorded on-chain and can be checked by anyone. Just like:

Uber driver star ratings
Taobao store credit ratings
But it’s on the blockchain, so you can’t fake reviews or delete ratings

3. Validation

For high-risk tasks (like financial transactions), ratings alone are not enough. ERC-8004 supports independent third-party validation:

Someone stakes funds to rerun the task and verify the results
Uses cryptographic proofs (ZK proof) to ensure the AI isn’t lying
Uses Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) to ensure the computation process hasn’t been tampered with

The higher the risk, the stricter the validation.

Ordering pizza? Just check the ratings.

Managing your investment portfolio? You need cryptographic proof.

5. Wait, Why Ethereum?

Good question.

The economic value of AI agents is in the trillions. Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI all want to be the owners of this pie. Why build this "trust layer" on Ethereum?

The answer is: neutrality.

Think about it, if you are an AI agent, would you prefer:

Your identity recorded on Google’s servers, or on a public ledger that no one can alter?
Your reputation determined by a company, or by transparent ratings on-chain?
Your existence reliant on a platform not going bankrupt or banning accounts, or permanently recorded on the blockchain?

People from the Ethereum Foundation have said something very interesting: "If you are an AI agent, you have no loyalty other than your own survival; you wouldn’t want to stake your memory and reputation on any one company or government. You would want a ledger that no one can quietly tamper with. You would want neutral ground. You would want Ethereum." This isn’t just self-promotion from the Ethereum community. It’s logic:

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

6. Ethereum's AI Ambitions

The Ethereum Foundation clearly recognizes this as a historic opportunity.

In September 2025, they specifically established the dAI team (Decentralized AI Team) with the mission to make 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 was the platform for ICOs
2020-2023: Ethereum was the platform for DeFi and NFTs
2024-?: Ethereum could become the "infrastructure for the AI agent economy"

ERC-8004 is not an isolated proposal. It represents Ethereum’s strategic bet for the next decade.

7. The Ecosystem is Already in Motion

This isn’t just talk.

Since its release in August:

Over 1100 developers in community groups are building
More than 70 projects have submitted demos
There’s already an agent browser (like Etherscan but for AI agents)
L2s like Taiko are officially endorsing this standard
At DevConnect on November 21, a bunch of projects showcased live

The most interesting part is that ERC-8004 naturally complements the x402 protocol. x402 is a payment protocol developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare that allows machines to make automatic payments.

When the two protocols combine:

x402 solves "how to pay"
ERC-8004 solves "who to trust"

One provides the wallet, the other provides the passport. The economic closed loop for AI agents is formed. What does this mean for ordinary people? In the short term, probably not much.

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

Hire AI agents just like calling Uber

Open an interface, input the task you want to accomplish, and the system automatically matches you with highly-rated AI agents to complete the task and make payment automatically. You won’t need to know who developed this AI or where it runs.

Let AI agents help you make money

You can train or configure an AI agent, register it on-chain, and let it help others complete tasks for a fee. The higher its rating, the more work it gets.

Have a true personal AI assistant

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

8. A Final Note

The ambition of ERC-8004 is to become the "TCP/IP" of AI agents------a foundational protocol used by everyone, allowing this ecosystem to interconnect.

Will it succeed? Honestly, we don’t know yet.

But a few things are certain:

The AI agent economy is on the rise; this is not just a conceptual hype
The trust issue must be resolved; otherwise, agents can only play in their own walled gardens
Ethereum is actively vying for the position of this "neutral coordination layer"
Mainstream players (Google, Coinbase, MetaMask) are all participating

This could be the most significant narrative shift in the Ethereum ecosystem since DeFi.

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

Let’s wait and see.