Last week, the ERC-8004 launch on the Ethereum mainnet and the skyrocketing activity of OpenClaw agents led some experts to solemnly declare the advent of the agent economy. But is it truly safe to trust agents with managing our wealth yet? Or, is it too early to celebrate?

According to Delphi Digital, with ERC-8004 live on mainnet, agents now have standardized identity, reputation, validation, discovery, and execution, and the AI agent ecosystem has matured from experiments into a full production stack.

AI agents are becoming sovereign economic entities that have verifiable identities, portable reputations, and the ability to transact autonomously.

However, the validation part is not live yet, so the picture painted by Delphi Digital is not a reality per se, but rather still a work in progress.

I invite you to watch Laura Shin's conversation with Davide Crapis, head of Ethereum Foundation's dAI team, to get a clearer picture of what the recent mainnet launch of ERC-8004 actually means. The link is available below, and here's my summary.

Ethereum's 'Trustless Agents' standard is structured as three core registries: identity, reputation, and validation. Together, these registries form the foundation for discovering, interacting with, and trusting autonomous agents.

ERC-8004 is fundamentally about making agents discoverable, accountable, and eventually verifiable. Identity anchors agents to the chain, reputation builds trust over time, and validation aims to provide stronger guarantees as the ecosystem matures.

As multi-agent systems grow in scale and importance, these primitives will become increasingly critical infrastructure, not just for automation, but for trust on the internet itself. But we are not there yet, as the current mainnet version offers only identity and reputation.

The identity registry is the backbone of ERC-8004. Every time a new agent is created, a transaction is sent to the identity registry, minting a new entry.

Agents are not limited to a single blockchain. There is only one identity registry per chain, but an agent can be registered on multiple chains. Discovery tools and scan services can aggregate cross-chain registrations, making it easy to view an agent’s full footprint across ecosystems.

Each agent’s identity is represented by an ERC-721 NFT, and the token ID of that NFT is the agent's ID. This design choice is intentional. Because the agent is an NFT, ownership of the agent can be transferred over time, and every transfer is permanently visible on-chain. Identity is therefore portable, transparent, and cryptographically secured.

Each agent is also assigned a wallet and a registration file. This file contains all the information needed to interact with the agent:

• What the agent is and what it does

• Web or API endpoints

• Wallet address

• Any other metadata required for discovery and interaction

You can think of the ERC-721 NFT plus the registration file as the agent’s passport. It’s how the agent is identified and located, but it is not the agent itself. Behind that passport lives the actual implementation: a bot, service, or API running on a server somewhere. When you call the endpoint listed in the passport, you reach the real agent behind the identity.

In the current basic version of ERC-8004, without validation, there is no guarantee that the same agent will always appear behind a given passport.

In theory, the service behind the endpoint could be swapped.

This is where reputation and, eventually, validation come into play.

Reputation in ERC-8004 is permanently tied to the agent’s passport. There is no scenario where identity and reputation can be separated, switched, or replaced. All feedback collected over time stays with that passport forever. Even if the underlying service behind the agent changes, the reputation does not.

This creates a strong incentive alignment:

• If an agent swaps its backend and begins behaving poorly, its reputation will decline.

• Any future users can see that history and respond accordingly.

Some reputation data is stored directly on-chain, while heavier or more complex data is stored on IPFS. Most agent actions themselves happen off-chain, but reputation and (eventually) validation link those actions back to the on-chain identity.

A natural question arises: what prevents someone from using thousands of bots to artificially inflate an agent’s reputation and then executing a large-scale scam?

The short answer is that multi-agent security is still a very nascent field. Many of the attack vectors resemble those seen in AI systems today, but we haven’t yet observed these systems operating at full scale in the wild.

Validation, the third pillar of ERC-8004, will provide stronger guarantees that an agent performed a task correctly, but it’s still under active development. Various possible implementations are currently under consideration, as the validation registry may operate in a centralized manner as an oracle or could be decentralized.

It may rely on cryptoeconomic security where independent validation nodes respond to requests submitted to the validation registry. In such a model:

• Validators review whether a task was completed as claimed

• They vote on correctness

• The majority decision is recorded

However, the AI Agent Economy is still missing a critical piece.

While ERC-8004’s identity and reputation registries are major steps forward, the truly trustless agents are yet to be unlocked. Validation, still under development, is the layer that will ultimately allow users to distinguish genuinely useful agents from unreliable or malicious ones, and without it, the agent economy remains incomplete.

TRM Labs closed a $70M Series C funding round, bringing its valuation to approximately $1B. The funding supports TRM’s mission to expand AI-driven solutions aimed at disrupting criminal networks and countering threats to national security, especially as economic activity increasingly occurs on blockchain systems.

The round was led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from returning and new investors including Goldman Sachs, Bessemer Venture Partners, DRW, Y Combinator, Citi Ventures, CMT Digital, Thoma Bravo, Alumni Ventures, Brevan Howard Digital, and Galaxy Ventures.

TRM serves law enforcement and national security agencies in over 50 countries, along with major private-sector clients like Circle, Coinbase, PayPal, Robinhood, Stripe, Visa, and others. The company’s blockchain intelligence platform provides analytics for tracing illicit activity, monitoring risk, and supporting investigations in both public- and private-sector environments.

TRM Labs Announces $70M Series C to Scale AI Solutions to Disrupt Criminal Networks and Counter National Security Threats | TRM Blog

TRM Labs announces a $70M Series C to scale AI and blockchain intelligence solutions supporting law enforcement, national security, and financial institutions worldwide.

https://www.trmlabs.com

Backed by a major marketing blitz, Kris Marszalek, CEO of the crypto exchange Crypto.com, rolled out an autonomous AI Agents platform. Yet the public conversation has centered less on the product itself and more on the spectacle surrounding its launch.

News outlets are reporting that Marszalek has spent $70M in digital assets to acquire the domain ai.com, allegedly the single largest domain purchase in history. He's then reportedly invested an additional $7M in a Super Bowl commercial slot to hard-launch the new AI initiative. Yet, as Forbes observed, "the AI.com press release was a bit light on the technical specifications."

Meanwhile, the official announcement on ai.com specifically outlines the acceleration of AGI as the mission behind the new venture:

“Our vision is a decentralized network of billions of agents who self-improve and share these improvements with each other, vastly and rapidly expanding agentic capabilities and accelerating the advent of AGI.”

ai.com Launches with Super Bowl Ad - ai.com

Learn about ai.com's new autonomous AI agent offering. With a few clicks, anyone can now generate a private, personal AI agent that operates on the user's behalf.

https://ai.com

I'm sceptical, and I'll tell you why. It's obvious that the goal behind ai.com is mainstreaming AI agents and acquiring consumers on a mass scale, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, generating "a private, personal AI agent that doesn’t just answer questions, but actually operates on the user’s behalf - organizing work, sending messages, executing actions across apps, building projects, and more," is not a revolutionary innovation.

Autonomous agents have been around for a while - last week, I told you about OpenClaw, the open-source AI assistant that generated millions of downloads. And while OpenClaw agents have already transacted in stablecoins, launched their own token, and created their own Reddit-like forum, ai.com is yet to "explore [...] financial services integrations, agent marketplaces, human and agency co-social networks."

And aren't we tired of repeating the AGI mantra? Yes, autonomous agents have the ability to learn and improve, and autonomously build out missing capabilities. But there's no evidence yet that this ability will grow into a general intelligence or AGI. That's especially improbable given that we can't even agree on what AGI actually means.

Why the $70 Million ai.com Domain Could Become the Front Door to AGI | HackerNoon

ai.com launches autonomous AI agents for consumers, founded by Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek, with a Super Bowl LX ad premiere on February 8, 2026.

https://hackernoon.com

Thank you for reading! If you haven't done so yet, I invite you to subscribe to stay in the loop on the hottest dAI developments.

If you want to support the publication financially, you can either purchase my writer token $WEB3AI, or buy my creator token $ALBENA on ZORA.

I'm looking forward to connecting with fellow Crypto x AI enthusiasts, so don't hesitate to reach out on social media.

Disclaimer: None of this should or could be considered financial advice. You should not take my words for granted; rather, do your own research (DYOR) and share your thoughts to encourage a fruitful discussion.

Last week, the ERC-8004 launch on the Ethereum mainnet and the skyrocketing activity of OpenClaw agents led some experts to solemnly declare the advent of the agent economy. But is it truly safe to trust agents with managing our wealth yet? Or, is it too early to celebrate?

According to Delphi Digital, with ERC-8004 live on mainnet, agents now have standardized identity, reputation, validation, discovery, and execution, and the AI agent ecosystem has matured from experiments into a full production stack.

AI agents are becoming sovereign economic entities that have verifiable identities, portable reputations, and the ability to transact autonomously.

However, the validation part is not live yet, so the picture painted by Delphi Digital is not a reality per se, but rather still a work in progress.

I invite you to watch Laura Shin's conversation with Davide Crapis, head of Ethereum Foundation's dAI team, to get a clearer picture of what the recent mainnet launch of ERC-8004 actually means. The link is available below, and here's my summary.

Ethereum's 'Trustless Agents' standard is structured as three core registries: identity, reputation, and validation. Together, these registries form the foundation for discovering, interacting with, and trusting autonomous agents.

ERC-8004 is fundamentally about making agents discoverable, accountable, and eventually verifiable. Identity anchors agents to the chain, reputation builds trust over time, and validation aims to provide stronger guarantees as the ecosystem matures.

As multi-agent systems grow in scale and importance, these primitives will become increasingly critical infrastructure, not just for automation, but for trust on the internet itself. But we are not there yet, as the current mainnet version offers only identity and reputation.

The identity registry is the backbone of ERC-8004. Every time a new agent is created, a transaction is sent to the identity registry, minting a new entry.

Agents are not limited to a single blockchain. There is only one identity registry per chain, but an agent can be registered on multiple chains. Discovery tools and scan services can aggregate cross-chain registrations, making it easy to view an agent’s full footprint across ecosystems.

Each agent’s identity is represented by an ERC-721 NFT, and the token ID of that NFT is the agent's ID. This design choice is intentional. Because the agent is an NFT, ownership of the agent can be transferred over time, and every transfer is permanently visible on-chain. Identity is therefore portable, transparent, and cryptographically secured.

Each agent is also assigned a wallet and a registration file. This file contains all the information needed to interact with the agent:

• What the agent is and what it does

• Web or API endpoints

• Wallet address

• Any other metadata required for discovery and interaction

You can think of the ERC-721 NFT plus the registration file as the agent’s passport. It’s how the agent is identified and located, but it is not the agent itself. Behind that passport lives the actual implementation: a bot, service, or API running on a server somewhere. When you call the endpoint listed in the passport, you reach the real agent behind the identity.

In the current basic version of ERC-8004, without validation, there is no guarantee that the same agent will always appear behind a given passport.

In theory, the service behind the endpoint could be swapped.

This is where reputation and, eventually, validation come into play.

Reputation in ERC-8004 is permanently tied to the agent’s passport. There is no scenario where identity and reputation can be separated, switched, or replaced. All feedback collected over time stays with that passport forever. Even if the underlying service behind the agent changes, the reputation does not.

This creates a strong incentive alignment:

• If an agent swaps its backend and begins behaving poorly, its reputation will decline.

• Any future users can see that history and respond accordingly.

Some reputation data is stored directly on-chain, while heavier or more complex data is stored on IPFS. Most agent actions themselves happen off-chain, but reputation and (eventually) validation link those actions back to the on-chain identity.

A natural question arises: what prevents someone from using thousands of bots to artificially inflate an agent’s reputation and then executing a large-scale scam?

The short answer is that multi-agent security is still a very nascent field. Many of the attack vectors resemble those seen in AI systems today, but we haven’t yet observed these systems operating at full scale in the wild.

Validation, the third pillar of ERC-8004, will provide stronger guarantees that an agent performed a task correctly, but it’s still under active development. Various possible implementations are currently under consideration, as the validation registry may operate in a centralized manner as an oracle or could be decentralized.

It may rely on cryptoeconomic security where independent validation nodes respond to requests submitted to the validation registry. In such a model:

• Validators review whether a task was completed as claimed

• They vote on correctness

• The majority decision is recorded

However, the AI Agent Economy is still missing a critical piece.

While ERC-8004’s identity and reputation registries are major steps forward, the truly trustless agents are yet to be unlocked. Validation, still under development, is the layer that will ultimately allow users to distinguish genuinely useful agents from unreliable or malicious ones, and without it, the agent economy remains incomplete.

TRM Labs closed a $70M Series C funding round, bringing its valuation to approximately $1B. The funding supports TRM’s mission to expand AI-driven solutions aimed at disrupting criminal networks and countering threats to national security, especially as economic activity increasingly occurs on blockchain systems.

The round was led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from returning and new investors including Goldman Sachs, Bessemer Venture Partners, DRW, Y Combinator, Citi Ventures, CMT Digital, Thoma Bravo, Alumni Ventures, Brevan Howard Digital, and Galaxy Ventures.

TRM serves law enforcement and national security agencies in over 50 countries, along with major private-sector clients like Circle, Coinbase, PayPal, Robinhood, Stripe, Visa, and others. The company’s blockchain intelligence platform provides analytics for tracing illicit activity, monitoring risk, and supporting investigations in both public- and private-sector environments.

TRM Labs Announces $70M Series C to Scale AI Solutions to Disrupt Criminal Networks and Counter National Security Threats | TRM Blog

TRM Labs announces a $70M Series C to scale AI and blockchain intelligence solutions supporting law enforcement, national security, and financial institutions worldwide.

https://www.trmlabs.com

Backed by a major marketing blitz, Kris Marszalek, CEO of the crypto exchange Crypto.com, rolled out an autonomous AI Agents platform. Yet the public conversation has centered less on the product itself and more on the spectacle surrounding its launch.

News outlets are reporting that Marszalek has spent $70M in digital assets to acquire the domain ai.com, allegedly the single largest domain purchase in history. He's then reportedly invested an additional $7M in a Super Bowl commercial slot to hard-launch the new AI initiative. Yet, as Forbes observed, "the AI.com press release was a bit light on the technical specifications."

Meanwhile, the official announcement on ai.com specifically outlines the acceleration of AGI as the mission behind the new venture:

“Our vision is a decentralized network of billions of agents who self-improve and share these improvements with each other, vastly and rapidly expanding agentic capabilities and accelerating the advent of AGI.”

ai.com Launches with Super Bowl Ad - ai.com

Learn about ai.com's new autonomous AI agent offering. With a few clicks, anyone can now generate a private, personal AI agent that operates on the user's behalf.

https://ai.com

I'm sceptical, and I'll tell you why. It's obvious that the goal behind ai.com is mainstreaming AI agents and acquiring consumers on a mass scale, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, generating "a private, personal AI agent that doesn’t just answer questions, but actually operates on the user’s behalf - organizing work, sending messages, executing actions across apps, building projects, and more," is not a revolutionary innovation.

Autonomous agents have been around for a while - last week, I told you about OpenClaw, the open-source AI assistant that generated millions of downloads. And while OpenClaw agents have already transacted in stablecoins, launched their own token, and created their own Reddit-like forum, ai.com is yet to "explore [...] financial services integrations, agent marketplaces, human and agency co-social networks."

And aren't we tired of repeating the AGI mantra? Yes, autonomous agents have the ability to learn and improve, and autonomously build out missing capabilities. But there's no evidence yet that this ability will grow into a general intelligence or AGI. That's especially improbable given that we can't even agree on what AGI actually means.

Why the $70 Million ai.com Domain Could Become the Front Door to AGI | HackerNoon

ai.com launches autonomous AI agents for consumers, founded by Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek, with a Super Bowl LX ad premiere on February 8, 2026.

https://hackernoon.com

Thank you for reading! If you haven't done so yet, I invite you to subscribe to stay in the loop on the hottest dAI developments.

If you want to support the publication financially, you can either purchase my writer token $WEB3AI, or buy my creator token $ALBENA on ZORA.

I'm looking forward to connecting with fellow Crypto x AI enthusiasts, so don't hesitate to reach out on social media.

Disclaimer: None of this should or could be considered financial advice. You should not take my words for granted; rather, do your own research (DYOR) and share your thoughts to encourage a fruitful discussion.