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ERC-8004 just went live on Ethereum mainnet recently, and it feels like one of those quiet milestones that might matter a lot in hindsight. I have been going down the rabbit hole on agent infra lately, and the pattern is hard to ignore. Every protocol that wants autonomous agents to interact ends up reinventing reputation from scratch. Siloed scores, incompatible formats, nothing composable. When trust can't travel, you get the blunt fallback: overcollateralization and heavy safeguards. Timing's interesting too. Agents are starting to get traction outside crypto-native circles. Tools like OpenClaw are pushing personal agents to regular users, which means the next wave of agent interactions won't just be devs and power users. If agents are going to transact, route tasks, and coordinate at scale, we need a way to say "this agent has a history" without inventing a new reputation system every time. My thesis isn't "reputation replaces collateral." It's narrower. Reputation can reduce collateral requirements when paired with real enforcement. Reputation informs pricing and access. Enforcement handles loss recovery. Wrote up Part 1 covering the economics, what ERC-8004 actually provides, and where it breaks. Curious if anyone else is tracking this space. submitted by /u/tirtha_s |
