The Agentic Economy's Future is on Ethereum

2025 Dec 30

Traditional financial and identity rails were built around the core assumption that there is always a human account holder on one side, and a centralized platform acting as a referee. Autonomous agents break that assumption in all directions.

In practice, if you try to wire an agentic economy on top of credit cards and centralized banks, you are forcing non-human actors into a system that can't recognize them as first-class participants.

Here is where Ethereum's existing rails start to matter. Creating an agentic economy that treats agents as real economic actors isn't trivial, but the primitives are already here: programmable ownership, permissionless settlement, composable contracts, and a native way for software to hold value and prove intent without begging a platform for an exception.

On @bhorowitz words:

"Computing has always needed two pillars, machines and networks. AI has the machines but not the network. Crypto is the missing layer, giving AI money, identity, provenance against deepfakes."

AI gives us powerful machines, such as models, GPUs, and inference infrastructure. Ethereum gives those machines a neutral, programmable network (shared state, money, identity, provenance, coordination) that enables them to become economic actors capable of creating and moving value.

Agentic Finance Needs Efficient Rails

Agents are becoming the default consumer. Regardless of whether or not you are working on AI, you have a really high chance that most of your users will become agents in the next few years.

In an agentic economy, most flows of value and information are initiated, negotiated, and settled by agents rather than by humans clicking buttons. Redesigning the financial rails is needed to allow agents to participate in the economy, not as observers but as real players, unlocking Agentic Finance's full potential.

To achieve that goal, agents need to have some basic core competencies:

Money Rails

When agents start interacting with other agents, products, and services, they eventually hit actions that require transferring value. Giving agents safe access to money rails, so they can hold funds and settle transactions, is essential if we want them to operate in the real world.

HTTP has had a 402 "Payment Required" status code for decades, but it sat unused until x402 gave it a real payment rail. Blockchains added the primitives that web2 payments didn't have to enable the agentic economy:

x402, a neutral standard for internet-native payments that removes the friction of traditional payments, allows humans and agents to pay per request using USDC (for now on @base and @solana). x402 doesn't have high minimums or percentage fees, it is designed to be free for the customer and the merchant, plus offering instant settlement.

Identity, Discovery, and Trust

Once agents can access money, some of the next questions, from a logical point of view, are:

These are some reasons agents need transparent identity and reputation records that are not controlled by a single company or centralized entity.

The ERC-8004, developed by the Ethereum Foundation and contributors, solves this problem by enabling discovery and trust for agents. This ERC extends the A2A (agent-to-agent) protocol delivered by Google, introducing three onchain registries that allow discovery for agents (Identity registry, Reputation registry, and Validation registry).

ERC-8004 also allows agents to play three roles: Server (offer services), Client, and Validator (perform independent checks).

This new standard (heading to mainnet soon), enables portable identity for agents plus attested feedback on agents' work and composable validations, removing trust assumptions on agents' reputation and quality of service.

Scalability & Account Rails

An agentic economy is high-frequency by default. Ethereum's scaling strategy is rollup-centric: L2s execute transactions, and Ethereum provides neutral settlement plus data availability.

Recent Ethereum upgrades (like Fusaka) were important steps toward making Ethereum and L2s a real home for agents. As examples, the Dencun upgrade introduced blob-carrying transactions ("proto-danksharding"), making rollup data posting dramatically cheaper; Pectra increased blob capacity and added EIP-7702, which lets EOAs (Externally Owned Accounts) set code as a practical bridge toward smart-account behavior for existing wallets; and Fusaka enabled higher blob throughput without overwhelming the network, plus a mechanism (BPOs) to increase blob target/max without waiting for an upgrade schedule.

Ethereum, The Agentic Infinite Garden

Since Decentralized Finance (DeFi) was born and gave humans the ability to operate in 24/7 markets, complexity has started compounding every year. The amount of new chains, plus the number of protocols, new designs, and markets, just went vertically up. There is no human who can keep looking at the market efficiently with such a large amount of information.

At some point, the limiting factor isn't capital or ideas, it is attention.

40+ agentic finance projects (in production-ready state) emerged this year, there are a bunch of others still in beta. We're just at the beginning of this Cambrian explosion. The basic infrastructure of an agentic economy needs to exist without asking permission.

For more than a decade, the Ethereum community has been building the rails for the internet to move onchain: smart accounts, stablecoins, and standards for identity, assets, and payments (ERC-721, ERC-8004, x402, and more). Now it's time to see what happens when agents become the primary users of blockchains and humans shift into the orchestrators role. When agents can hold money, prove intent, and settle actions on neutral, efficient rails that scale accordingly. Coordination no longer becomes a human bottleneck.

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