* The Ethereum Foundation has unveiled ERC-8004, a proposal to build decentralized AI systems that can rebuild trust in artificial intelligence.
* It says that some of the world’s leading AI developers, including from Google, have come onboard to help realize on-chain AI-to-AI interactions.
The Ethereum Foundation’s proposal to host decentralized AI infrastructure on the Ethereum network is edging cloer to reality. Under ERC-8004, the network is creating trustless AI agents, with the support of industry leaders like Google and Coinbase.
The Foundation first proposed ERC-8004 in August last year with the formation of a new AI team, as we reported. Since then, it has been working with leading developers to finetune the future of decentralized AI. It announced on Tuesday that the proposal is going live on the mainnet soon, stating:
By enabling discovery and portable reputation, ERC-8004 allows AI agents to interact across organizations ensuring credibility travels everywhere. This unlocks a global market where AI services can interoperate without gatekeepers.
Under the new protocol, AI agents can discover, select and interact with other agents without the need for pre-existing trust, ushering in an era of open-ended agent economies, the Foundation says.
In an accompanying video, Davide Crapis revealed that the Foundation’s ambition go beyond the blockchain community. It’s targeting tech firms and AI developers globally, and it believes once the proposal is live, they will see the value of decentralized platforms and turn to Ethereum for their AI infrastructure needs. Crapis is the leader of the AI team at the Foundation.
He stated:
Ethereum is in a unique position to be the platform that settles most of this AI-to-AI interactions.
Ethereum Lays Groundwork for Decentralized AI
The Ethereum Foundation’s ambition to attract players beyond blockchain is off to a great start. According to Crapis, in the five months since ERC-8004 was announced, nearly 2,000 developers have started building on top of the new standard.
Crapis developed the standard alongside Marco De Rossi, the AI lead at MetaMask. Since then, other notable names have joined the movement, including Jordan Ellis, a core AI developer at Google. He stated:
We’re seeing tremendous adoption of this protocol, and we’re just getting started.
Essentially, ERC-8004 is building on top of the existing agent communications protocols, like Agent-to-Agent (A2A) from Google. It then assigns three new registries: identity, reputation and validaiton. This gives an agent verifiable onchain identity, shows the feedback from others who have worked with it, and enables third parties to verify its work. This provides the three most important factors for trust while keeping it lightweight and inexpensive to run.
AI continues to be one of the primary technologies impacting the crypto sector, and most top networks have extensive initiatives that seek to integrate the technology. Trust, privacy and security are the main themes that blockchain developers are working on. A week ago, Cardano’s privacy network Midnight announced a new partnership with AlphaTON to introduce confidential AI to Telegram, as we reported.
Ethereum trades at $3,030 at press time, gaining 2.6% in the past day as the broader market recovers.
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