ERC-8004 Went Live in January. The Identity Layer for Non-Human Actors Is Being Built on Public Rails.

In January, Google, Coinbase, MetaMask, and the Ethereum Foundation shipped a shared answer to a question that enterprise infrastructure has been circling for years: how does an autonomous agent prove who it is to a stranger? ERC-8004 provides three on-chain registries for agent identity, reputation, and validation. No payments, no execution logic. Just the minimum viable layer so non-human actors can discover and evaluate each other without a pre-existing trust relationship.

SPIFFE and OAuth address similar problems inside organizational walls. ERC-8004 addresses it for the open web. The coalition behind it suggests the problem has moved from theoretical to load-bearing.