An Ethereum smart contract standard enabling trustless artificial intelligence agent communication on the network is “probably” going to be deployed on mainnet on Thursday, according to Marco De Rossi, head of AI at MetaMask.
Further development of ERC-8004 has been “frozen […] and we will go to mainnet midweek, probably around Thursday, 9 AM ET,” said De Rossi on a Telegram channel for developers of the protocol on Monday.
On Tuesday, the official Ethereum X account said the protocol is going live on mainnet “soon.”
“By enabling discovery and portable reputation, ERC-8004 allows AI agents to interact across organizations, ensuring credibility travels everywhere,” it explained.
The Ethereum Request for Comment proposes a standard way to register and validate AI agents. Developers can implement it in their smart contracts, and it does not require any changes to the Ethereum network itself.
The proposal explains that the protocol is designed for discovering, choosing, and interacting with agentic AI across organizational boundaries without pre-existing trust, enabling open agent economies on blockchain.
Agentic AI economy coming to Ethereum
The standard solves two core problems: how to find AI agents and how to know which agents are reliable.
While protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Agent2Agent handle agent communication, skills advertising, and task orchestration, they don’t address discovery or trust.
“To foster an open, cross-organizational agent economy, we need mechanisms for discovering and trusting agents in untrusted settings.”
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“Ethereum is in the unique position to be the platform that secures and settles AI-to-AI interactions,” said AI lead at the Ethereum Foundation, Davide Crapis, on Tuesday.
Ethereum is in the unique position to be the platform that secures and settles AI-to-AI interactions.
The ERC-8004 standard is coming to mainnet. pic.twitter.com/sjMziiPuaQ
— Davide Crapis (@DavideCrapis) January 27, 2026
AI services can interoperate without gatekeepers
The standard will also work on the Ethereum layer-2 Base, according to developers on Telegram, but they did not provide a time frame for deployment.
Base uses x402, an open payment protocol developed by Coinbase and introduced in May 2025, which enables instant, automatic stablecoin payments directly over HTTP, empowering AI agents to pay for services autonomously.
The launch of ERC-8004 provides the missing piece that lets AI agents become economic actors rather than just isolated, siloed tools.
“This unlocks a global market where AI services can interoperate without gatekeepers,” stated the Ethereum account on X.
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