Ethereum positions its basic layer to coordinate autonomous agents, a movement that machine places, to machine trade on a direct path to settlement on the chain in the coming year.
This month, the Ethereum Foundation was a dedicated DAI team with an assignment to promote agent -identity, trust and payments, including support for ERC-8004A draft standard for agent thorns and verification that would anchor identity and certificates at the protocol level.
The initiative Ethereum fits as a regulation and coordination layer for agent economies, with censorship resistance and open access as core design goals, while community concepts around ERC-8004 sketches how identity and trust in the chains can negotiate automated systems without Custodi-intermedes.
The delivery of the short term is research and standards progress that can be taken over by portfolios, middleware and dapps in 2026, creating a shared trust substrate for agent applications.
Token flows already reflect an AI -tilt in crypto -markets.
AI-oriented tokens such as Bittensor, Fetch.ai (ASI), internet computer and Render have maintained on-chain activities and relative price stability to ENG Q3, which exceed wider Altcoins during the recent market collection.
RoyThe market tradups of the market point to the continuous demand for decentralized calculation, inference and agent frameworks, while ecosystem reports show that ICP’s urge to Native App Hosting and Render’s GPU marketplace draws a steady use of AI -Workloads.
Per Token statisticsDefi total value locked in the early 2025 of around $ 72 billion in the direction of $ 100 billion, with new AI-Native Defi-Rails such as Blackhole Dex on Avalanche, Sahara AI and Moby AI that contributed to volumes and reimbursement generation that followed volatility. Token -Statistics places this in a broader rotation in the direction of automated liquidity and implementation of agent who can work on chains via messages and omnichain -abstractions.
The payment stack convergates on agent use cases on the protocol limit. Google introduced the Agents for payments, or AP2, Protocol In September to ask software agents and to confirm consumer payments through standardized flows, a building block for invoicing machine-to-machine and subscription patterns that can communicate with crypto-settlement rails.
According to Google Cloud, AP2 is designed on explicit permission from users, verifiable agent identities and reversible transactions for compliance, and early pilots include Ethereum and ICP integrations via external connectors that bridge Fiat accounts with transfers to chains.
As these pilots grow up, portfolios can treat agents as first-class actors, with ERC-8004-style certificates that allow policy to issue CAP per time frame, limiting counterparties or requiring a human fellow sign for high value thresholds.
Forward models are now binding sanitary upgrades to measurable network demand.
Token Metrics’ September Scenario work projects AI Smart Agents that reach 15 to 20 percent of the Defi-transaction volume at the end of Q4, which, if maintained and strengthened by the DAI route map of Ethereum, places AI-Geignegrated Protocols in the $ 200 to 300 billion.
The same analysis frame A diet in the use of base layer, with gas consumption for agent identity and implementation contracts rise 30 to 40 percent quarter in quarter in 2026 as soon as standards such as ERC-8004 see broad adoption in detention, consumer wallets and DAO-Midleware.
In practice, this means that governance, treasury rebalancing, fee routing and cross-chain liquidity management can be carried out by software agents who work with risk limits, insurance and verifiable references on the chain.
Security results are another lever in the adoption curve. Academic and industrial research into adaptive, AI-assisted contracts indicates a sharp fall in successful exploits when contracts can detect anomalies, coordinate parameters and reject suspicious flows in quarantine in almost real-time.
Early models show Reductions of up to 70 percent in successful attacks for systems that link rules based on rules to learned heuristics, compared to static parameter schemes. This result depends About transparent update policy and monitor behavior on the chain to prevent opaque control surfaces from being created, a point that matches the auditability of smart contract and incident report.
The macroctext changes from concept to pilot.
Regulatory agendas in the United States and Europe include work flows on automated financial agents, transparency for adaptive contracts and disclosures on model risks.
DLA PiperThe September -Korte and other legal trackers describe a path where agent identities, user policy and exception treatment must be readable for supervisors and counterparties, a requirement that matches the identity and certificate of Ethereum instead of against playing.
Recent enforcement themes emphasize the effectiveness of control, not on technology bans, which supports a runway for conforming agent activities such as adult standards.
Hiring data remains supportive, with Recruit Registration of an increase of 22 percent on an annual basis in 2025 for roles on the AI and blockchain intersection, spread over protocolsieurs, data infrastructure and applied cryptography, a pipeline that matters if agent frameworks have to reach the production scale over consumer and enterprise touchpoints.
Cross-Market, the machine economics people is not limited to a single pile. Avalanche organizes AI-Governed Liquuidity via Blackhole Dex, Ethereum focuses on identity and regulation, near and ICP Court on-Chain app Hosting and low-Latency Insentence, and supplies GPU sources for training and modeling service.
Koinly’s and token Metrics cover Place these in complementary roles instead of direct substitutes, with a thesis that extends the demand for decentralized conclusion and market coordination as agents become standard factors in payments, fulfillment and protocol activities.
If the growth model of ICP for native AI-hosting is committed, on-chain in-chain can inference cycles in half reduced by half by 2026, so that agent would make interactivity viable for user-oriented applications such as intent routers, real-time hedging and supply-chain of IoT settlement.
| Protocol | Primary AI function | Volume on the chain or TVL, September 2025 | Forward focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ethereum | Agent Identity and Settlement, ERC-8004, DAI team | $ 38b+ | Trust and coordination layer for agents |
| Bittensor, Tao | Decentralized training and inference markets | $ 1.4 billion est. | Open AI Compute Exchange |
| Fetch.ai, fet | Autonomous Economic Agents, Dapp -Infrastructure | $ 640 million est. | Machine-to-machine coordination |
| Render, RNDR | Decentralized GPU and Inference | ~ $ 985m | Calculate the backbone for AI on the chain |
| Internet computer, ICP | Native on-chain ai app hosting | $ 800 million+ | Lower latency for agent Dapps |
| Blackhole Dex, Avalanche | AI-Governed Amm and Liquidity | $ 193 million | Permissionless agent trade |
The scenarios fall into three buckets.
A basic case has Ethereum the identity and trust layer that takes at least a quarter of the new DAPPS automation by 2026, as at least a quarter of the new DAPPS automation, the converging of administration, treasury, reimbursements and payments in programmable policy anchored in attestations.
A bull path runs on a fuller machine economy where agents deal with bilateral negotiation and fulfillment in contexts of consumers and companies, where Defi TVL goes beyond $ 300 billion and decentralized API market places that reach critical mass for long-tailed services.
A Beer Case focuses in the field of legal licenses of agents and continuous centralization of calculation and model access, which would limit open participation and bottlenecks innovation to a small number of well-funded teams.
The overview of DLA Piper and policy trackers indicate transparency and control standards such as the Fulcrum, not outright prohibitions, but calculation of centralization remains a known limitation.
Investors and builders shift from token stories to measurable adopted triggers.
With regard to the standards side, ERC-8004 is a core watch item, because portfolios and storage providers have to implement certificate controls, recovery flows and policy enforcement for agents to work safely in consumer’s contexts.
On the payment side, if expanded to crypto rails on a scale, AP2 pilots would offer the first repeatable pattern for subscriptions, user invoicing and fulfillment between non-human actors, and they would put pressure on bridges and account abstraction stacks to expose finely meshed limits and approvals.
On the security side, field license would reduce adaptive checks to reduce the loss realized, unlocking more autonomous administration, especially for parameter tuning in volatile markets. Each of these tracks has public milestones that can be checked without trusting price charts alone.
The open question goes beyond whether agents will pass; It is where the settlement and trust controls take place.
As an identity, certificates and policy in the Life Chain, the machine economy will be offered as standard and Defi will become the operating system for non-human economic activity. If those checks remain on closed platforms, the role of crypto will collapse to bridges and payment rails.
With the DAI mandate of Ethereum, the AP2 route for agent payments and a measurable shift in the developer who hires to AI x crypto-rolls, the center of gravity is on the way to verifiable coordination on chain that deals with agents as the first-class participants in the market.
