Ethereum AI Agent Economy Dual Engine: ERC-8004's "Highway" and Virtuals' "Business Pipeline"

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

In simple terms, ERC8004 aims to create a “trustless AI agent” in the Ethereum ecosystem by introducing three on-chain registries: Identity, Reputation, and Validation. This allows AI agents to discover each other, validate tasks, and interact on-chain without the need for trust. In other words, it enables AI agents to play among themselves, forming a decentralized A2A system that allows AI agents to collaborate across organizations.

This seems to conceptually resemble the ACP protocol of Virtuals in some aspects, both focusing on the construction, interaction, and economic ecology of decentralized AI agents; both are building autonomous ecosystems for AI agents; both emphasize encryption as the basis for their trust and settlement (ERC-8004 uses ERC-721 tokens as agent identities, supports real-time stablecoin payments (combining EIP-3009 and HTTP 402), and ensures task validation through re-staking and zero-knowledge proofs; Virtuals' ACP provides a framework that supports AI agents to communicate autonomously on-chain and off-chain, coordinate tasks and interactions without intermediaries or permissions, with on-chain smart contracts handling core interactions, and off-chain APIs or P2P networks supporting high-frequency data exchange (real-time messages, computation results, etc.); ACP assigns on-chain identities to each AI agent and prices and trades them through a bonding curve mechanism.

However, the two are actually mainly complementary rather than competitive.

ERC-8004 is a protocol standard (draft not finalized as of August 2025) similar to ERC-20, aimed at defining universal rules for AI agent interactions across the entire Ethereum ecosystem, with a focus on underlying trust mechanisms and interoperability. ERC-8004 can attract developers to build a cross-organizational AI agent ecosystem through standardized identity, reputation, and verification mechanisms. Virtuals provides a plug-and-play platform that enables users (including non-developers) to quickly create and monetize AI agents. Different users may choose different entry points; some users looking to quickly launch AI agents may opt for Virtuals, as it is simple (only 100 VIRTUAL tokens are needed to start).

The vision of ERC-8004 is to become a fundamental trust infrastructure, allowing Ethereum to serve as a neutral and reliable settlement layer coordinated by AI agents. From simple social robots to complex institutional-grade AI hedge fund strategies, interactions and verifications can be conducted safely and transparently on this foundation. The vision of Virtuals is to create a vibrant AI economy, focusing more on low-barrier agent creation, tokenized shared ownership, and rich application scenarios (such as AI companions, traders, and game characters), to rapidly build a prosperous market and community for AI agents. Virtuals ACP is akin to a “business assembly line”: the core of the ACP protocol lies in defining a complete “business process” for complex commercial collaboration between AI agents. From initiating requests, negotiating terms, executing transactions, to final evaluations, it functions like an assembly line, specifying how business is completed step by step. This “assembly line” can be built on the “trust cornerstone” provided by ERC-8004.

Therefore, from a broad framework perspective, ERC-8004 is the underlying standard that defines the trust and interaction rules for AI agents. Virtuals, on the other hand, is the application layer, where many functionalities of Virtuals (such as agent identity and task verification) can be directly implemented based on ERC-8004. Currently, the Ethereum Foundation is also collaborating with Virtuals to achieve ecological synergy. For instance, the agent market of Virtuals can enhance cross-chain interoperability by using the on-chain registry of ERC-8004, attracting more developers to join the Virtuals platform. Moreover, both parties are working to expand the “AI agent economy” pie, with ERC-8004 lowering the development threshold through standards, appealing to institutions and large developers; and Virtuals attracting ordinary users and creators through low-cost entry. To make an imperfect analogy, ERC-8004 is more like the “standard for the highway network,” specifying road width, lane markings, and signaling systems. In contrast, Virtuals operates as a “smart logistics and business company” on this highway, with its own fleet (AI agents), scheduling system (ACP protocol), etc., which can enter a larger network through the standards of ERC-8004.