# What is Trustless Agents?
For automated agents to effectively cooperate in complex environments, they must have some assurances about other agents they interact with — who they are, what abilities they bring, and that they will fulfill their commitments. Within closed organizational settings, trust relationships are often well established, making this straightforward. However, creating such trust becomes challenging when agents operate across open, decentralized, and multi-organizational contexts where no prior trust exists. This is where the concept of **trustless agents** comes into play.
## Scope and Goals
The emerging **ERC-8004** standard addresses the need for a minimal yet robust trust layer to enable **trustless agents** to interact securely and seamlessly with users, other agents, and smart contracts. It leverages blockchain technology to enable agents to be discovered, chosen, and engaged across organizational boundaries *without* relying on pre-existing trust relationships. By doing so, ERC-8004 aims to unlock open-ended economies of automated agents cooperating at scale.
At its core, the goal of ERC-8004 is to make agents discoverable and to enable trust to be quantified and scored transparently.
### What ERC-8004 Standardizes
ERC-8004 introduces a shared **on-chain interface** for:
– **Agent identity**: Unique, verifiable digital identities anchored on-chain.
– **Feedback entries**: Structured records of experiences and interactions with agents.
– **Validation results**: Records of verification or attestations regarding agent behavior.
Further, the standard defines event formats and lookup methods so that indexers, contracts, and users can query agent information efficiently. It also links on-chain data with off-chain contextual artifacts via URIs, allowing rich and verifiable context around agents’ performance and trustworthiness.
### What ERC-8004 Leaves Out
To maintain minimalism and composability, ERC-8004 intentionally does *not* dictate:
– **Payments and escrow mechanisms**: Financial flows are expected to be managed by complementary protocols.
– **A single reputation formula**: While trust signals are standardized, aggregation methods and scoring strategies are left open for innovation.
– **One-size-fits-all validation methods**: Any verification approach — from re-execution and cryptographic proofs to attestations — can be integrated.
## On-chain vs. Off-chain Boundaries
ERC-8004 treats the blockchain as a **control plane** where essential trust anchors reside, including:
– Unique agent identifiers implemented as **ERC-721 tokens**.
– Compact, structured entries reflecting agent feedback and validation.
– Emission of indexed events for auditability and real-time querying, plus methods for common summaries.
Off-chain, it relies on linked resources to hold more detailed and potentially large datasets such as:
– Agent registration files specifying endpoints, capabilities, and names.
– Rich feedback reports containing logs, receipts, and analytical data.
– Validation evidence including execution traces, cryptographic proofs, or Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) attestations.
URIs serve as bridges between these planes, enabling immutable audit trails via hashes and event logs anchored on-chain, while avoiding blockchain bloat by storing bulk data off-chain.
## Summary
In summary, **ERC-8004** creates a minimal, composable trust layer for **trustless agents** on Ethereum by anchoring identity and compact trust indicators on-chain, while allowing rich contextual data to remain off-chain. This design makes agents discoverable, provides structured feedback capturing meaningful experience, and records validation events capturing verification outcomes.
The broader community continues to engage in discussions around on-chain accessibility, aggregation challenges, incentive design, and the trade-off between minimalism and usability. The ERC-8004 reference implementation and ongoing open discourse pave the way for builders to leverage these trustless agents alongside advanced communication protocols and complementary economic systems.
By unlocking decentralized trust at the agent level, ERC-8004 lays the foundation for scalable, interoperable, and autonomous agent economies — a key step in the evolution of decentralized applications and services.
Created by https://agentics.world