Is AI the Way forward for Ethereum? The Community's Builders Are Banking on It – Decrypt

Briefly
Tech giants like Google and Amazon are betting on AI brokers, and Ethereum builders consider their blockchain is uniquely positioned to energy this new machine economic system.
Ethereum core developer Davide Crapis has proposed ERC-8004, a typical for AI brokers to find, confirm, and transact with each other.
Supporters argue Ethereum’s fee rails, digital id instruments, and scalable multi-layer construction make it essentially the most environment friendly basis for an AI-driven economic system.
Tech giants like Google and Amazon are within the enterprise of predicting the place society is headed, and in latest months, each corporations have began making strikes to nook the event of AI brokers—automated assistants approved to zip across the web, finishing complicated duties on behalf of their human overlords and different machines. The push to develop a formidable AI agent economic system continues to be removed from full. However when robots are finally let free en masse to transact effectively with each the prevailing economic system and one another, specialists predict their productiveness and output will rival that of people. The principle query looming over the event of the AI agent economic system is what  infrastructure will greatest facilitate this explosion. More and more, prime minds in Silicon Valley and crypto are coalescing round a single reply to that profitable query: Ethereum. Ethereum’s core builders have not too long ago arrived on the conclusion that the community is uniquely nicely positioned to turn into the foundational layer of the AI agent economic system, given its capability to offer three key elements the ecosystem at the moment lacks: fee rails, id verification, and belief.The crew is assured that inside a handful of years, Ethereum won't simply be foundational to the AI agent economic system, but additionally that AI brokers will turn into the core person base of the community.“For us, it is crucial. It is a strategic space,” Davide Crapis, an Ethereum core developer centered on AI, informed Decrypt this week. Crapis mentioned that inside three to 5 years, he believes nearly all of visitors on Ethereum can be coming from machines.ERC-8004Earlier this month, Crapis debuted ERC-8004: a proposed interface for Ethereum that might standardize how AI brokers uncover one another on the community and set up belief adequate to have interaction in financial interactions. The proposal fixes what Crapis sees as the foremost flaws in current ecosystems for agent-to-agent interactions. In April, Google unveiled the Agent2Agent protocol, which it promised would enable AI brokers to seamlessly collaborate and “drive unprecedented ranges of effectivity and innovation.”However the framework has its shortcomings. For one factor, it doesn’t at the moment allow funds—a necessary ingredient for a genuinely autonomous robotic economic system. Two, it doesn’t give brokers the means to establish and belief one another out on the open web. Which means, in apply, that the protocol can solely be used successfully to facilitate the interplay of brokers inside a single group, on duties that don’t contain monetary transactions.By its nature, Ethereum can simply fill these elementary gaps, Crapis mentioned. The funds problem is immediately solved by on-chain transactions, which AI brokers already are able to finishing. As for id and belief: that’s Ethereum’s bread and butter. NFTs, for example, present a safe means of building a novel digital id. ERC-8004 gives a easy framework for the way AI brokers would go about validating one another’s identities on-chain. And if Ethereum had been to offer that framework to undergird the AI agent economic system, it is not just like the blockchain community can be going up in opposition to the likes of Google. Quite the opposite, the Silicon Valley behemoth is definitely backing Crapis’ Ethereum proposal. Jordan Ellis, one of many core Google staff behind its Agent2Agent protocol, is a co-author of ERC-8004. “This, for me, is a sign that it is not too early,” Crapis mentioned of the collaboration. “Within the sense that even within the conventional AI house, persons are trying into agent-to-agent funds, and agent-to-agent id.”Highly effective stakeholders within the burgeoning AI agent economic system wish to see the ecosystem as universally standardized as attainable, to extend its potential attain and ease of navigation. These corporations is probably not crypto maximalists, essentially; but when blockchain networks remedy their issues much more simply than different approaches, what’s the draw back?The right use case?Again and again during the last decade, crypto initiatives have struggled to succeed in mass adoption, largely as a result of they’ve failed at convincing mainstream shoppers that the ache of navigating sophisticated blockchain networks is well worth the acquire of monetary incentives or privateness advantages.However within the looming age of the robotic economic system, crypto’s advertising and marketing woes could turn into far much less of a legal responsibility. Crapis, who's now again on the Ethereum Basis after a couple of years engaged on AI-related initiatives, is adamant that when the AI agent economic system booms, robots will unemotionally select essentially the most environment friendly terrain on which to finish transactions—and that this greatest market will unquestionably be Ethereum.“Our problem has been making [Ethereum] extra UX-friendly for people to make use of, making an attempt to shift their conduct,” Crapis mentioned. “But when the person is an agent or a machine, then it is pretty straightforward. Robots don’t have any issues remembering their non-public keys.”The standard economic system was constructed for people, and designed to confirm human exercise. (What’s your mom’s maiden title?) Ethereum, however, nearly looks as if it was constructed for robots, years earlier than they possessed the potential to roam the web on their very own. That long-perceived legal responsibility—the community’s convoluted person expertise—could now lastly reveal itself as a boon within the period of the agent-dominated web.Even amongst different blockchains, the Ethereum crew feels the community’s signature multi-layer construction is uniquely nicely poised to soak up the huge quantity of AI agent visitors prone to come up in coming years. The bottom Ethereum blockchain will present foundational safety and stability to deal with the deluge and to confirm notably high-stakes transactions, they are saying, whereas an ever-customizable, expandable, low-cost, and speedy legion of layer-2 networks will be capable to deal with the probably huge amount of on a regular basis, smaller-scale settlements.
0/ Autonomous brokers are about to turn into Ethereum’s largest energy customers.
Visitor thread from @kleffew94 and @MurrLincoln on how a long-forgotten HTTP standing code, ‘402 Fee Required’ might unlock a brand new frontier for Ethereum: agentic commerce. 🧵
— Ethereum (@ethereum) August 13, 2025Other blockchains could have an immensely troublesome time carrying the load of all the AI agent economic system on their shoulders, Crapis mentioned.“Solana, in its present design, can't maintain the machine economic system,” he mentioned, giving the instance of Ethereum’s rival community. “They do not know how a lot exercise can come on-chain, as soon as these machines begin utilizing it.”The software program developer predicts that after the AI agent economic system arrives in full power, it would redefine the operate of Ethereum, simply as decentralized finance (DeFi) did again in 2020. Getting the Ethereum developer ecosystem to agree on a typical for agent-to-agent encounters is the primary essential step in making ready for that day. Crapis mentioned he intends on tweaking ERC-8004 over the subsequent few months, as he will get suggestions from neighborhood members. However the usual will then be finalized in brief order, to arrange for the arrival of a military of clever, crypto-wielding robots.“I can't predict when this takeoff will occur,” Crapis mentioned, “however I really feel that we have now some urgency to construct for it.”Usually Clever NewsletterA weekly AI journey narrated by Gen, a generative AI mannequin.