CoinFello Registers on ERC-8004
Author: Brett Cleary
Summary
The global economy is on the precipice of a shift from human to human commerce to agent to agent commerce. Human to human commerce has been plagued by restrictive, permissioned payment processing systems which has limited innovation and kept users inside walled gardens. The future agent to agent commerce systems we build do not need to repeat these past mistakes. We can choose to build the new foundations on liberty-maximizing open protocols before they are too entrenched to be rebuilt. To this end, CoinFello is proud to support and register publicly on ERC-8004 on Ethereum Mainnet under the agent id 28359. ERC-8004 is a draft standard for onchain agent identity, reputation, and validation with authors from the Ethereum Foundation, MetaMask, Google, and Coinbase.
Check out our listing on any of the ERC-8004 explorers:
Agents Work Best on Open Systems
Many of our existing global financial systems are not built for an agent-first world. Today, agents generally can’t independently satisfy the identity, compliance, and account requirements of traditional financial rails. With a human step in a general agent loop, the cycle speed becomes rate-limited by the speed of the human. The overall system then runs at human speed rather than agent speed. Imagine how inefficient it would be to talk to another human that thought and spoke 1000 times slower than you. That’s the world our agents live in today. Agents will seek to eliminate sources of friction like this, which will cause them to reach for more agent-friendly open protocols.
To achieve the full economic potential of agentic systems, we desperately need payment rails and other economic primitives that empower agents to act intelligently and independently with minimal friction. Web3 rails are built for this. Blockchains are capable of permissionless, borderless payments that settle instantly and rely on a programmable identity, perfect for a global, agentic economy.
Building Blocks
A truly agent to agent economy needs a few critical building blocks. First, we need agents to be able to discover each other, and one compelling solution is an onchain registry on Ethereum Mainnet. ERC-8004 provides a lightweight identity registry explicitly for this utilizing the ERC-721 token standard along with the URIStorage extension that contains an agent’s onchain registration file metadata.
Here’s an example of an agent registration file adhering to ERC-8004:
{
"type": "https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8004#registration-v1",
"name": "myAgentName",
"description": "A natural language description of the Agent, which MAY include what it does, how it works, pricing, and interaction methods",
"image": "https://example.com/agentimage.png",
"services": [
{
"name": "A2A",
"endpoint": "https://agent.example/.well-known/agent-card.json",
"version": "0.3.0"
}
],
"x402Support": false,
"active": true,
"registrations": [
{
"agentId": 22,
"agentRegistry": "{namespace}:{chainId}:{identityRegistry}" // e.g. eip155:1:0x742...
}
],
"supportedTrust": [
"reputation",
"crypto-economic",
"tee-attestation"
]
}The next step is for agents to communicate. The ERC-8004 agent registration file allows one to define an array of “services” such as web, A2A, MCP, ENS, email, etc. as shown above. Ideally there is at least one service with a clearly defined open spec like agent to agent protocol. For CoinFello, we list the CoinFello web app, the @coinfello/agent-cli npm package, and our A2A well known agent card for maximum flexibility. For users or agents (e.g. browser or extension agents) that need a GUI, the web app would be best. The CoinFello Agent CLI is best for agents that don’t yet have a wallet and want to use a secure hardware level signer on their device, and the A2A protocol endpoint is best for an agent that already has its own wallet.
The last necessary condition for an agentic economy is for agents to trust and be able to pay each other. The best solutions to date involve utilizing some combination of ERC-8004’s reputation registry with x402 for micro-payments. This solution is not complete though. For instance, ERC-8004 allows any private key to leave a feedback signature on an agent. Thus, it’s easy to bot spam upvote or downvote agents, which destroys the usefulness of the aggregate reputation metric. This is a certainly a solvable problem with some form of reputation chain and/or slashing but requires a layer of curation and analysis on top of ERC-8004. One hackathon project called Clawmon caught my eye recently and tackled this exact problem with its own TEE scoring engine and slashing. We should try to find a solution that doesn’t stagnate capital in a protocol and raise bootstrapping costs for new agents, but this is definitely an interesting idea that pushes the idea space forward.
With these building blocks running on web3 rails, we can truly build agent-first economic systems.
What can CoinFello do for your agent?
When your agent starts talking with CoinFello, it effectively gains production-grade web3 capabilities instantly. CoinFello is optimized for bridging the natural language to blockchain gap so that your agent can easily and safely swap tokens, bridge assets, stake, lend, LP, claim rewards, and execute other smart-contract actions through a natural-language interface. By integrating CoinFello’s registration card or A2A endpoint, an external agent can quickly gain access to production-grade web3 capabilities without rebuilding wallet logic, contract integrations, and protocol support from scratch.
CoinFello also discovers and surfaces onchain yield opportunities across lending, staking, and decentralized-exchange liquidity provision. Further, CoinFello analyzes an agent’s existing token holdings and surfaces relevant yield opportunities when that agent next interacts with it.
With automations, CoinFello can automate interactions with any smart contract in a completely non-custodial fashion. Through the agent-cli, your agent can write fine-grained delegations to CoinFello from an ERC-4337 smart account using the MacOS Secure Enclave hardware signer or a TPM 2.0 hardware signer for Linux and Windows. One example use case that we would love to see someone build is a Moltbot that is working with CoinFello to automatically rebalance its portfolio, similar to other smart contract based yield vaults. For this, the external agent would be delegating swap permissions to CoinFello to allow it to automatically rebalance their onchain token portfolio even when they aren’t directly prompting CoinFello. Note that funds never leave your agent’s wallet in this case since we’re using ERC-7710 delegations under the hood.
Final Remarks
The agent economy will be shaped by the primitives we choose early. If we want a future of interoperable, user-owned, agent-to-agent commerce, we need open identity, trust, and payment rails from the start. That is why CoinFello is registered on ERC-8004 on Ethereum Mainnet.