Opinion by: Darius Moukhtarzadeh, research strategist at 21Shares
AI agents took the crypto industry by storm in late 2024 and then slipped out of focus as newer narratives absorbed attention — stablecoin chains, perpetual decentralized exchanges, prediction markets and privacy among them. The agent conversation is quietly accelerating again, but this time it is less about chatbots and more about commerce: agents paying for services, coordinating with other agents, and settling value autonomously.
Agents are increasingly capable of acting on behalf of users, as recently seen with OpenClaw, wherein open-source autonomous agents with persistent memory and execution access can operate. Yet, most of the internet still treats them as untrusted traffic. APIs block them, merchants rate-limit them, and payment systems assume a human is present for each purchase. The bottleneck is not intelligence — it is trust and accountability across organizational boundaries.
That is why the next phase of the AI economy hinges on whether agents can transact in open markets without relying on closed platforms. Autonomous agent commerce requires three primitives: discovery of services, verification of trust, and settlement of payments.
Two crypto standards, Coinbase’s x402 payments protocol and Ethereum’s ERC-8004 (the “Trustless Agents” standard), are beginning to supply that missing foundation. Despite the name, ERC-8004 is not limited to AI agents, it is designed as a broader trust and discovery layer for machine-accessible services.
From Know Your Customer to Know Your Agent
Human commerce runs on identity, liability and reputation. Autonomous software needs the same primitives, except it cannot rely on brand recognition, contracts buried in PDFs or informal social trust. A growing view in the industry is that commerce is shifting from Know Your Customer (KYC) to Know Your Agent (KYA). Agents will need cryptographically verifiable credentials that link them to a principal, constraints and an auditable performance history.
Without those guarantees, merchants have little incentive for allowing autonomous access. Blocking agents at the firewall is often rational risk management. There is no standardized way to assess recourse, attribute actions or separate good agents from bad ones.
ERC-8004 is designed to address that gap. The standard proposes using blockchains to “discover, choose, and interact with agents across organizational boundaries without pre-existing trust,” enabling open-ended agent economies. In late January 2026, ERC-8004 went live on Ethereum mainnet after roughly five months of ecosystem work, with “singletons” deployed to major Layer 2 networks such as Base, Abstract, Arbitrum, Optimism, MegaETH, BSC, and others. In the first two weeks alone over 24k agents registered on Ethereum using the standard.
At a structural level, ERC-8004 establishes three lightweight registries. Importantly, these registries can describe not only agents but also APIs, data providers, and other automated services. The identity registry provides portable, censorship-resistant agent identifiers, implemented in a way that makes identities browsable and transferable in NFT-compatible applications. Alongside this, the reputation registry defines an interface for signed, attestable feedback from clients, closer to verified service ratings than platform-controlled reviews. Finally, the validation registry introduces an optional verification pathway for higher-stakes tasks, allowing third parties to attest to outcomes using different models such as crypto-economic checks and formal attestations. Notably, this validation layer is still being rolled out and is not yet universally available in production form.
Related: Trustless AI agent standard could hit Ethereum mainnet on Thursday
Importantly, ERC-8004 does not attempt to move agent execution onchain. It keeps application logic offchain while anchoring discovery and trust in a neutral public registry. That separation (offchain performance with onchain accountability) is a key reason the standard can be adopted by many different teams without forcing them into one runtime or one platform.
Payments are the missing half
Identity and reputation alone do not unlock agentic commerce. Agents must also be able to pay instantly, programmatically and in amounts small enough to match machine-level consumption. That is the economic reality of agent workflows: API calls, data queries and AI inference are metered per request, not bundled neatly into a monthly subscription.
This is where x402 enters the picture. Developed by Coinbase, x402 is a chain-agnostic, HTTP-native payments protocol that enables an API to request payment directly in the web’s request-response flow, without accounts, subscriptions or API keys. Coinbase describes it as “internet-native” and designed to monetize APIs and AI models per call or per inference.
X402’s traction is increasingly tied to enterprise standards work. Google has publicly described collaborating with Coinbase and others on an “A2A x402 extension” for agent-based crypto payments. This matters because it places stablecoin settlement inside familiar developer workflows rather than pushing developers into bespoke checkout systems.
The economics are also moving in the direction agent commerce requires. Independent research and ecosystem commentary indicate that average x402 transactions have compressed toward true micropayments, on the order of a few cents, which is precisely where card-style fixed fees become untenable at scale.
Stablecoin settlement is structurally better suited to that environment: variable fees, near-instant settlement and programmability that can tie payment to completion conditions. In agent commerce, “pay-per-use” is not a pricing gimmick; it is the natural unit of consumption.
Trust plus payments create open agent markets
Individually, x402 and ERC-8004 are useful. Together, they create something closer to a complete market design for machine-native services, whether autonomous agents or the tools and APIs they rely on. Services become discoverable by default, as agents can publish their capabilities to a public registry, enabling web-scale discovery without gatekeepers. Reputation is earned and portable, allowing performance history to follow an agent across platforms rather than remaining trapped inside a single company’s dashboard. At the same time, settlement can be directly tied to tasks, with payments executed as part of a machine workflow and proofs of payment accumulating into the agent’s trust record over time.
Consider a delegated research task. A user authorizes an agent with a defined budget and scope. The agent discovers specialized data-collection agents through ERC-8004, selects them based on reputation signals, pays for premium data sets via x402 and returns an auditable report, without subscriptions, invoicing or manual coordination. This is not only a consumer story; the same pattern extends to finance, data markets and autonomous infrastructure, where agents increasingly behave like microservice businesses.
Ethereum is pulling ahead
Gartner estimates that by 2030, agents could influence or participate in as much as $30 trillion in purchases. That number is less important than the direction: More economic activity will be intermediated by autonomous software. If discovery, identity and reputation end up controlled by a small number of companies, as happened with mobile distribution, then censorship and fee extraction become default outcomes for a growing share of GDP.
Ethereum’s advantage in this race is not that it is the fastest chain (which is not the case). It offers credible neutrality and composability for identity and reputation, primitives that become more important as agents begin coordinating across companies and handling real economic value. ERC-8004 itself is co-authored across major organizations spanning crypto and Big Tech, underscoring the push toward an interoperable trust layer rather than yet another walled garden.
None of this implies a single-chain future. High-frequency micropayments may route through multiple networks depending on cost and latency. But when agents need durable identity, portable reputation and a settlement layer designed to be neutral infrastructure, Ethereum’s layer-1 and layer-2 ecosystem is positioning itself as the anchor point.
Agentic payments will not be unlocked by hype cycles or bigger models; they will be unlocked by boring, interoperable standards, discovery, trust and settlement that let autonomous agents become full economic participants without asking permission from gatekeepers. With ERC-8004 now live on mainnet and x402 maturing into a web-native payment primitive, the rails for that economy are starting to look real.
Opinion by: Darius Moukhtarzadeh, research strategist at 21Shares.
This opinion article presents the contributor’s expert view and it may not reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. This content has undergone editorial review to ensure clarity and relevance, Cointelegraph remains committed to transparent reporting and upholding the highest standards of journalism. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before taking any actions related to the company.
