Kate Irwin

This is a segment from The Drop newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/the-drop" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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How will we find new AI agents to use in the near future? What could a decentralized, more open AI ecosystem look like? And how will AI agents make payments for us?



<a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-foundation-team-ai-integration">ERC-8004</a>, a new Ethereum technical standard first unveiled <a href="https://medium.com/survival-tech/the-story-behind-erc-8004-next-steps-ec46c18d1879">this summer</a>, aims to be an answer to all that. The <a href="https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8004">standard</a> is being peer-reviewed, and its smart contracts were launched on the Ethereum testnet this month. MetaMask AI Lead Marco de Rossi, Ethereum Foundation AI lead Davide Crapis, Google engineer Jordan Ellis, and Coinbase Developer Platform engineering lead Erik Reppel co-created the protocol, which also incorporates feedback and contributions from a slew of other crypto companies and projects.



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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">LIVE NOW: AI Agents can discover and trust each other without a central intermediary. This lays the foundation for open agent economies. ERC-8004 v1, co-authored with <a href="https://twitter.com/DavideCrapis?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DavideCrapis</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/ethereumfndn?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Ethereumfndn</a>), <a href="https://twitter.com/jordan0ellis?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Jordan0Ellis</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/Google?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Google</a>) and &#8211; welcome Erik! &#8211; <a href="https://twitter.com/programmer?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@programmer</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/coinbase?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Coinbase</a>) is now… <a href="https://t.co/purYaxWk1P">pic.twitter.com/purYaxWk1P</a>&mdash; Marco De Rossi (@marco_derossi) <a href="https://twitter.com/marco_derossi/status/1976257886390002116?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 9, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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ERC-8004 lets builders and users mint AI agents like they’re NFTs and delegate them using those ERC-721 rails. It makes AI agents discoverable, and can hold agent reputation scores onchain. The AI agents can use <a href="https://docs.cdp.coinbase.com/x402/welcome">x402</a>, a new open payment protocol developed by Coinbase.&nbsp;



Agent developers could ultimately charge for access to their tools and agents, who could be deployed for a range of use cases around user productivity, trading, payments or even reshape consumers’ <a href="https://clam.capital/blogs/future-of-media-is-a-bank">subscription diets</a>. At some point, perhaps AI agents could even hire each other to complete different tasks, like a more open version of what Google has developed with <a href="https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-interoperability/">A2A</a>.



“Maybe it’s early to think about the business model fully, even if x402 is clearly the best monetization source for AI agents, but we should focus a lot on use cases and not just on the infra,” De Rossi told me in an interview.



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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">x402 will unlock pay-per-use models that save users real money Many of us today pay $100+/month across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok &#8211; rarely hitting limits Future: Imagine paying only $20 for what you actually use Add streaming, articles, content sampling platforms, and the…&mdash; Jake Hiew (@jakehiew) <a href="https://twitter.com/jakehiew/status/1983099386038190152?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 28, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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The agents themselves aren’t being stored on Ethereum because, as De Rossi explained, running AI agents in such a way is very complicated and would require “a lot of overhead.”&nbsp;



So it’s not going to be that decentralized. But there’s definitely a middle path that 8004 unlocks for developers between a completely closed ecosystem and something completely open and decentralized.&nbsp;



In this vision, users or companies host their own AI agents on their own devices or servers. Then, they use the blockchain, via 8004, as an open app store of sorts to share their models with others and receive ratings and feedback.&nbsp;



For this to have broad consumer appeal, AI agent explorers of sorts — pretty frontends with checkout integrations — would have to be built for humans. De Rossi said that roughly half a dozen teams in crypto are already working on making something to this effect a reality.



“The current situation is that you see stuff on the [block] explorer which is totally unusable,” he said.&nbsp;



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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Everyone’s hyped about x402 right now. Most haven’t realized it’s just one piece of something way bigger. The real shift that will define Crypto × AI is Agentic Commerce. AI agents autonomously trading, negotiating, and executing with minimal human input.<a href="https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@a16zcrypto</a>’s state… <a href="https://t.co/NTgNsMjjaR">pic.twitter.com/NTgNsMjjaR</a>&mdash; Soubhik Deb (@soubhik_deb) <a href="https://twitter.com/soubhik_deb/status/1982823993645445359?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 27, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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Building something that anyone can use can be a difficult line to walk, though, if various platforms decide to restrict the visibility of certain types of AI agents.



But maybe this will happen in a more organic way if the crypto community is able to, collectively, give agents feedback and therefore shape their reputations. Agents with better reputations could get more visibility, while questionable agents with lower scores fade into the background (but remain accessible).&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="653" height="611" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/image-141.png" alt="" class="wp-image-109580" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/image-141.png?w=653 653w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/image-141.png?w=300 300w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/image-141.png?w=275 275w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/image-141.png?w=279 279w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/image-141.png?w=234 234w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/image-141.png?w=80 80w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 653px) 100vw, 653px" /></figure>



“The bad outcome is we have many different silos, like app stores, [and] that’s it,” De Rossi said of the future of AI agent discoverability. “That’s just worse for consumers.”&nbsp;



“If we want to make this happen in an interoperable way, there are two possibilities, probably. The US government,” De Rossi said with a laugh, “or the infrastructure owned by nobody, which is the blockchain.”



Pushing some vague ideals of whatever “Web3” is supposed to be isn’t going to spur blockchain adoption in the AI industry, De Rossi argued.



“Who cares? The point is, how can we have an infra that is neutral, and this is understandable to everybody. It’s public infrastructure.”



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Ethereum could be the ultimate app store for AI agents

Macauley Peterson

Two days after <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/google-ai-payments-protocol-stablecoin">unveiling</a> AP2 — a universal payment layer for AI agents that supports everything from credit cards to stablecoins — <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/google">Google</a> and <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/eigenlayer">EigenLayer</a> have released <a href="https://x.com/eigenlayer/status/1968697050452869438">details</a> of their partnership to bring verifiability and restaking security to the stack, using <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/ethereum">Ethereum</a>.



In addition to enabling verifiable compute and slashing-backed payment coordination, <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/eigencloud-launch-a16z-eigenlayer">EigenCloud</a> will support insured and sovereign AI agents, which introduce consequences for failure or deviation from specified behavior.



Sovereign agents are positioned as autonomous actors that can own property, make decisions, and execute actions independently — think smart contracts with embedded intelligence.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">From demos to dollars</h2>



AP2 extends Google’s agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol using the HTTP 402 status code — long reserved for “payment required” — to standardize payment requests between agents across different networks. It already supports stablecoins like USDC, and Coinbase has demoed an agent checkout using its Wallet-as-a-Service.



Paired with a system like <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lit-protocol-vincent-ai-agents">Lit Protocol’s Vincent</a> — which enforces per-action policies and key custody at signing — Google’s AP2 with EigenCloud’s verifiability and cross-chain settlement could form an end-to-end trust loop.



Payments between agents aren’t as simple as they are often made to sound by “Crypto x AI” LARPs. When an AI agent requests a payment in <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/usdc">USDC</a> on <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/base">Base</a> and the payer’s funds are locked in ETH on <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/arbitrum">Arbitrum</a>, the transaction stalls — unless something abstracts the bridging, swapping and delivery. That’s where EigenCloud comes in.



Sreeram Kannan, founder of EigenLayer, said the integration will create agents that not only run on-chain verifiable compute, but are also economically incentivized to behave within programmable bounds.



Through restaked operators, EigenCloud powers a verifiable payment service that handles asset routing and <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/cross-chain-bridge">chain abstraction</a>, with dishonest behavior subject to slashing. It also introduces cryptographic accountability to the agents themselves, enabling proofs that an agent actually executed the task it was paid for.



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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Honestly, most of the “AI agent” hype falls apart once you ask: how do I trust this thing? This solves for that.&mdash; brutal (@crypto_brutal_) <a href="https://twitter.com/crypto_brutal_/status/1968699106785735043?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 18, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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It’s a crowded field, with many projects vying to anchor agent settlement and accountability; EigenCloud faces rivals ranging from Autonolas’ <a href="https://blockworks.co/price/olas">OLAS</a> staking layer and the <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/daily/issue/post_8f914d32-6a47-400b-b689-72368982abc3">Eliza</a> (formerly AI16z) agent developer ecosystem, to <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/near">NEAR’s Chain Signatures</a> intent stack, and <a href="https://blockworks.co/podcast/0xresearch/72d82e36-f79a-11ee-b172-db0b0936b9a2">Ritual’s verifiable AI compute</a>.



Still, if AP2 becomes the standard interface for billions of autonomous agents, EigenCloud’s restaked security and cross-chain payment verification could become indispensable infrastructure.



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Google Cloud taps EigenLayer to bring trust to agentic payments

Onchain AI agents are edging out of the lab.&nbsp;



Lit Protocol’s agent stack, Vincent, now gives developers a way to ship non-custodial automation that actually touches money, but under explicit, enforceable limits set by users and app authors. An “early access” launch just went live, Blockworks has learned exclusively.



Lit frames the core model simply: policies (guardrails) and abilities (discrete actions like swap/borrow/bridge) that are bound together at deploy time and enforced at runtime, according to co-founder David Sneider.



“Vincent Policies (the guardrails and controls) are created and exposed by Vincent application developers based on any given use case,” Sneider told Blockworks. “For example, a trading app might expose a ‘spend policy’ or ‘token allowlist policy,’ which users would be able to fine-tune based on their own needs and preferences.”



Under the hood, Vincent rides on Lit’s existing “defense-in-depth” key model: Threshold-split keys run inside <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/0xresearch-newsletter-mev-trusted-execution-environments">secure enclaves</a> (TEEs), and the enclaves execute only when an onchain policy check passes. In practice, that means permissions like spend caps, allowlists, time windows and rate limits are evaluated before any signing or contract call occurs. A key recent improvement is how easily developers can now package and enforce those rules through Vincent at the point of execution.



According to examples from a “<a href="https://github.com/LIT-Protocol/vincent-starter-kit">starter kit</a>,” developers can define and expose app-specific policies as needed; the platform now supports both narrowly scoped and broader smart-contract permissions, with one-line SDK calls to invoke them.



In Sneider’s view, the job is to let agents act, but only inside well-defined lanes.



That’s effective, according to David Johnston, the lead code maintainer at Morpheus, which has built in Lit Protocol as part of its reference open-source agent work.



“MPC enables good spending caps, whitelists of agents, and limited time approvals for agents to access user funds,” Johnston told Blockworks. “These types of capabilities should be native to all agents,” he said, adding that it’s safer to integrate Lit rather than “rolling their own, less battle-tested solutions.” 



DeFi-specific risk hooks like <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/mev">MEV</a> protection and dealing with oracles are being left to app authors. “They also have the power to define all of their data sources [and] integrations with external protocols, which can help address possible constraints like these,” Sneider said, referring to aspects like slippage caps, private order flow routes, RFQ checks, or price-staleness guards. That stance keeps the core platform minimal while allowing domain-specialized teams the flexibility to customize.



Automated agents are not magic, and Morpheus’ Johnston notes “all the normal attack vectors and failure modes from DeFi will apply to agents leveraging DeFi, so the best means of mitigating them is to leverage L2s that have eliminated many of these risks with their structure, such as ordering transactions to avoid attacks.”



Vincent already produces success and failure signals and proofs for every execution, but those remain local to the developer’s app rather than being published to a wider registry. The roadmap points to privacy-preserving attestations that could travel across registries and agent networks, such that compliance proven in one venue can be trusted in another.



“The bigger vision is that agents will be able to surface these attestations in privacy-preserving ways into shared registries like <a href="https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/erc-8004-trustless-agents/25098">ERC-8004</a> and interagent communication protocols like A2A [Agent-to-Agent],” Sneider said. Think verifiable credentials (e.g. “I’ve complied with XYZ policy 100 times”) broadcast into a shared agent ecosystem, where other agents or platforms can trust them without re-auditing.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Beyond DeFi</h2>



Crucially, the agent landscape is expected to evolve to new use cases other than pure DeFi automation, to encompass credentials and APIs that real businesses live on, said Sneider.



“Our focus at the moment is on managing more secret types, like passwords and API keys so that agents can log into apps and we can break the current paradigm of agents being embedded within apps,” he said. “We’re also continuing to build out more Policy and Ability examples across many different chains and protocols (i.e. BTC and Solana), to give developers more jumping-off points and make it simpler to start launching agents with Vincent.”



If this sounds like the agent version of account abstraction, it’s intentional. Back in 2024, Sneider argued that “key, material signing is like the ultimate unifier amongst distributed systems, which are really just like state and signing at the end of the day.”



Tie that to enforceable policies and you get something closer to production-grade autonomy, as we see starting to happen now.&nbsp;



“This idea that everybody is going to have essentially a quant in their pocket to manage their funds seems pretty, pretty coherent and is starting to come together.”



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