Almost overnight, we have entered a world where AI agents write code, review contracts, and trade stocks. But these agents have no ID. Who made them, what they have done before, whether they can be trusted. There is no way to check. A ballroom where billions of people trade behind masks. This is where the agent economy stands in 2026. A world of capable beings with unknown identities. This is not a problem of technology. It is a problem of civilization.
One of the latest approaches to this problem is an Ethereum standard called ERC-8004. Engineers from MetaMask, the Ethereum Foundation, Google, and Coinbase are listed as co-authors. It is as if Visa, a central bank, Google, and a passport authority sat down at the same table. Why did they come together? Because they recognized that if everyone builds separately, everyone loses. The agent economy needs neutral technical infrastructure that no company owns, and only blockchain meets that condition.
ERC-8004 consists of three registries. The Identity Registry is an agent’s birth certificate. The Reputation Registry is its credit rating. Not just a star rating. The Validation Registry is its court. It offers three levels of verification based on how risky a task is: reputation-based, staking, and zkML/TEE.
Step back, and a timeline emerges. Agents’ declaration of capabilities (MCP) → agents’ common language (A2A) → agents’ currency (x402) → agents’ citizenship (ERC-8004). It follows the same sequence in which humanity created language, money, and law. The difference is that this is happening in 18 months, not tens of thousands of years.
Of course, it is not all rosy. Defense against Sybil attacks remains unsolved, payment integration is absent from the specification, and the developer experience is still rough. Agents themselves still hallucinate on complex tasks. One could ask whether we are issuing a driver’s license to a child just learning to walk. But roads are always laid before cars arrive. Infrastructure coming before apps is a pattern that has repeated without exception throughout the history of technology.
An agent society is coming. That society will need birth registration, a credit system, and courts. Right now, the first draft of its constitution is being written on Ethereum.
블록체인 위에 새겨진 에이전트의 여권Medium · medium.comOpen
