Want to Hire an AI Agent? Check Their Reputation Via ERC-8004
The ERC-8004 standard for trustless AI agent interactions is finally live on mainnet!
In this Unchained episode, Ethereum Foundation AI Lead Davide Crapis joins to explain what the standard is, how it works, how it’s protected against manipulation, and what's next.
Listen to find out his most interesting experience building the project and tips for builders looking to start businesses around AI agents.
Guest:
Davide Crapis, AI Lead at Ethereum Foundation
Links:
How the x402 Standard Is Enabling AI Agents to Pay Each Other
Uneasy Money: How Ethereum May Have One-Upped Bitcoin in One Big Way
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AI on Ethereum: ERC-8004, x402, OpenClaw and the Botconomy | Austin Griffith & Davide Crapis
AI agents aren’t “coming” to Ethereum—they’re already here, spinning up on dedicated machines, clicking through wallets, deploying contracts, and even building apps for themselves. In this episode, Ryan and David sit down with Davide Crapis and Austin Griffith to map the emerging agent stack: ERC-8004 as a decentralized identity + reputation layer, x402 as payment rails for agent-to-agent commerce, and the real-world “Clawdbot” experiments that show what happens when an agent gets a wallet, a codebase, and a mandate. Along the way: prompt-injection risks, why agents read calldata like it’s their native language, and why it may be the best time in history to be a solo builder—even as it gets harder to be a junior dev.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 “AI is the new UI,” and you’ll be talking to your wallet
4:09 Is there an arms race for AI activity across chains?
7:32 The Clawdbot/OpenClaw moment: agents get OS-level power
13:18 Why crypto is native to agents
19:41 Austin’s setup: Claude bot, heartbeat loops, and real autonomy
22:28 The token incident: how a bot “got a treasury”
28:46 Prompt injection meets wallets
38:20 ERC-8004 explained: identity, reputation, validation
40:35 x402 + 8004: discovery + payment rails for agent commerce
48:38 8004 “scans” and early adoption reality
1:05:32 What agents could build when they can hire other agents
1:12:38 Tooling for the new builder era: Speedrun → Wingman
1:25:23 “Worst time to be a junior dev…”
1:28:15 Predictions: clean English becomes the sign of AI
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RESOURCES
Austin Griffith
https://x.com/austingriffith
Davide Crapis
https://x.com/DavideCrapis
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