Ethereum AI Agent Economy's Dual Engines: ERC-8004's "Highway" and Virtuals' "Commercial Assembly Line"

ERC-8004 is a proposed Ethereum standard designed to establish a decentralized, trustless infrastructure for AI agents, featuring on-chain registries for identity, reputation, and validation to enable secure, transparent collaboration across organizations.
Virtuals' ACP protocol provides a ready-to-use platform for creating and monetizing AI agents, emphasizing low-barrier entry, tokenized co-ownership, and support for both on-chain and off-chain interactions.
The two initiatives are complementary: ERC-8004 acts as a foundational "highway" setting universal trust and interoperability standards, while Virtuals operates as a "commercial assembly line" on top, focusing on rapid agent deployment and market growth.
Collaboration between the Ethereum Foundation and Virtuals aims to enhance ecosystem synergy, such as using ERC-8004's registries to boost cross-chain interoperability for Virtuals' agent market, collectively expanding the AI agent economy by attracting both developers and everyday users.

A few days ago, @brucexu_eth reminded me to pay attention to Ethereum’s ERC8004 proposal. It seems that the Ethereum community has begun preparing for the arrival of on-chain AI agent economies.

Simply put, ERC8004 aims to create a "trustless AI agent" on the Ethereum ecosystem, introducing three on-chain registries: identity, reputation, and validation. In this way, AI agents can discover each other, verify tasks, and interact on the chain without trust. In other words, it allows AI agents to play with each other on their own. It is a decentralized A2A system that enables AI agents to collaborate across organizations.

This seems to be conceptually similar to Virtuals' ACP protocol. Both focus on the construction, interaction, and economic ecology of decentralized AI agents; both are building an autonomous ecosystem for AI agents; both emphasize encryption as the basis for trust and settlement (ERC-8004 uses ERC-721 tokens as agent identities, supports real-time stablecoin payments (combined with EIP-3009 and HTTP 402), and ensures task verification through re-staking and zero-knowledge proofs; Virtuals' ACP provides a framework that supports AI agents to communicate autonomously on and off-chain, coordinate tasks and interactions, without the need for intermediaries or permissions. On-chain smart contracts handle core interactions, and off-chain APIs or P2P networks support high-frequency data exchange (real-time messages, calculation results, etc.); ACP assigns an on-chain identity to each AI agent and uses a bonding curve mechanism for pricing and trading.

However, the relationship between the two is mainly complementary rather than competitive.

ERC-8004 is a protocol standard (draft as of August 2025, unfinalized), similar to ERC-20, that aims to define universal rules for AI agent interaction across the Ethereum ecosystem, with a focus on underlying trust mechanisms and interoperability. ERC-8004 attracts developers to build cross-organizational AI agent ecosystems through standardized identity, reputation, and verification mechanisms. Virtuals provides an out-of-the-box platform for users (including non-developers) to quickly create and monetize AI agents. Different users may choose different entry points. Some who want to quickly launch AI agents may choose Virtuals due to its simplicity (starting with 100 VIRTUAL tokens).

ERC-8004 aims to become a foundational trust infrastructure, making Ethereum a neutral, trusted settlement layer for AI agent coordination. From simple social bots to complex, institutional-grade AI hedge fund strategies, they can all interact and verify securely and transparently on this foundation. Virtuals' vision is to foster a vibrant AI economy, focusing on rapidly building a thriving AI agent market and community through low-barrier agent creation, tokenized co-ownership, and a rich set of application scenarios (such as AI companions, traders, and game characters). Virtuals ACP is akin to a "business assembly line": at its core, the ACP protocol defines a complete "business process" for complex business collaborations between AI agents. From request initiation, negotiating terms, executing trades, to final evaluation, it acts like an assembly line, dictating how business is completed. This "assembly line" can be built on the "foundation of trust" provided by ERC-8004.

Therefore, from a broader perspective, ERC-8004 is the underlying standard, defining the trust and interaction rules for AI agents. Virtuals is the application layer, and many of Virtuals' features (such as agent identity and task verification) can be directly implemented on ERC-8004. The Ethereum Foundation and Virtuals are currently collaborating to achieve ecosystem synergy. For example, Virtuals' agent market can leverage ERC-8004's on-chain registry to enhance cross-chain interoperability and attract more developers to the Virtuals platform. Furthermore, both are working to expand the "AI agent economy." ERC-8004 lowers the development barrier through standards, attracting institutions and large developers; Virtuals attracts ordinary users and creators through low-cost entry. To use a somewhat inappropriate analogy, ERC-8004 is more like a "highway network standard," specifying road widths, markings, and signal systems. Virtuals, on the other hand, is a "smart logistics and commerce company" operating on this highway, with its own fleet (AI agents) and dispatching system (ACP protocol). It can access the larger network through the ERC8004 standard.