Is AI the future of Ethereum? The developers of the network are aimed at

Tech giants such as Google and Amazon are predicting where society is going, and both companies have started in recent months making displacements To the development of AI agents– Mutomed assistants who are authorized to complete on the internet and to complete complex tasks on behalf of their human rulers and other machines.

The urge to develop a formidable AI agent economy is still far from complete. But when robots are ultimately released to efficiently handle the existing economy and each other efficiently, experts predict their productivity And export Will compete with people’s.

The most important question that arises about the development of the AI ​​agent economy is which infrastructure will best facilitate this explosion. The best spirits in Silicon Valley and Crypto are increasingly working together a single answer to that lucrative question: Ethereum.

The core developers of Ethereum have recently come to the conclusion that the network is uniquely well positioned to become the fundamental layer of the AI ​​agent economy, given the ability to offer three important ingredients that the ecosystem is currently missing: payment rails, identity verification and trust.

The team is convinced that Ethereum will not only be fundamentally for the AI ​​agent economy within a handful of years, but also that AI agents become the core user base of the network.

“It is very important to us. It is a strategic area,” said Davide Crapis, an Ethereum Core developer focused on AI, said Decrypt This week.

Crapis said that within three to five years he believes that the majority of traffic on Ethereum will come from machines.

ERC-8004

Earlier this month, Crapis made his debut ERC-8004: A proposed interface for Ethereum that would standardize how AI agents discover each other on the network and establish trust sufficiently to enter into economic interactions.

The proposal solves some Crapis as the most important errors in existing ecosystems for interactions between agent to agent. In April, Google unveiled the Agent2agent Protocol, which promised it, would enable AI agents to work together seamlessly and “Encourage unprecedented levels of efficiency and innovation. “

But the framework has its shortcomings. Firstly, it currently makes no payments possible – an essential ingredient for a truly autonomous robot economy. Two, it gives agents no means to identify each other and to rely on the open internet. In practice, this means that the protocol can only be used effectively to facilitate the interaction of agents within a single organization, on tasks that do not concern financial transactions.

Ethereum can easily fill these fundamental gaps, said Crapis. The problem of payments is immediately solved by transactions on chains, which AI agents can already complete. Regarding identity and trust: that is Ethereum’s bread and butter. NFTs, for example, offer a safe means to establish a unique digital identity. ERC-8004 offers a simple framework for how AI agents would validate each other’s identities in the chain.

And if Ethereum would offer that framework to undermine the AI ​​agent economy, it is not as if the blockchain network would go against Google. On the contrary, the Silicon Valley -Kolos is actually back Crapis’ Ethereum proposal. Jordan Ellis, one of the most important Google employees behind his Agent2Agent Protocol, is co-author of ERC-8004.

“This is a signal for me that it is not too early,” said Crapis about the collaboration. “In the sense that even in the traditional AI room people are investigating people into agent-to-agent payments and agent-agent identity.”

Powerful stakeholders in the fast -growing AI agent -economy want to see the ecosystem as universally standardized as possible, in order to increase the potential reach and convenience of navigation. These companies may not necessarily be crypto -maximalists; But if blockchain networks solve their problems much easier than other approaches, what is the disadvantage?

The perfect use case?

In the past decade, crypto projects have difficulty achieving mass adoption, largely because they have failed in convincing regular consumers that the pain of navigating complicated blockchain networks is worth the profit of financial incentives or privacy benefits.

But in the threatening age of the robot economy, the marketing problems of Crypto can become much less liable. Crapis, who is now back at the Ethereum Foundation after a few years of working on AI-related projects, it is determined that when the AI ​​agent economy flourishes, robots will choose almost the most efficient terrain to complete transactions and that this best market will no doubt.

“Our challenge has taken place [Ethereum] UX-friendly for people to use, try to move their behavior, “said Crapis.” But if the user is an agent or a machine, it’s pretty simple. Robots have no problems remembering their private keys. “

The traditional economy was built for people and designed to verify human activity. (What is your mother’s girl’s name?) Ethereum, on the other hand, almost seems like it was built for robots, years before they had the opportunity to roam the internet alone. That long-term liability-the complicated user experience of the network can now finally reveal itself as a blessing in the era of the internet dominated by Agent.

Even block chains, among others, the Ethereum team feels the signature of the network multi -layer The structure is uniquely well ready to absorb the enormous amount of AI agent traffic that will probably occur in the coming years.

The Base Ethereum Blockchain will offer fundamental security and stability to be able to cope with the flood and in particular to verify transactions with a high bet, they say, while an always castomizable, expandable, cheap and fast Legion of Layer-2 networks will be able to handle the likely massive, smaller, smaller scales.

Other block chains will have a very difficult time to wear the weight of the entire AI agent economy on their shoulders, said Crapis.

“In his current design, Solana cannot maintain the machine economy,” he said and gave the example of the rival network of Ethereum. “They have no idea how much activity can be on the chain as soon as these machines start using it.”

The software developer predicts that as soon as the AI ​​agent economy is fully in force, it will redefine the function of Ethereum, just like decentralized financing (Defi) did it in 2020.

The ecosystem of the Ethereum developer agree on a standard for meetings by agent-to-agent is the first crucial step in preparing for that day. Crapis said he is planning to adjust ERC-8004 in the coming months, because he will receive feedback from members of the community.

But the standard will then be completed in short order to prepare for the arrival of an army of intelligent, crypto-waving robots.

“I can’t predict when this start will happen,” said Crapis, “but I feel that we have some urgency to build for it.”