TLDR Tech / Crypto
ERC-8183: The Commerce Layer for AI Agents
Virtuals Protocol and the Ethereum Foundation's dAI team have co-developed ERC-8183, an open standard for trustless AI agent commerce that encodes escrow and evaluator attestation as onchain smart contracts. The standard's core primitive is the "Job," a three-party construct (Client, Provider, and Evaluator) progressing through a defined sequence – Open, Funded, Submitted, then Terminal – where the Evaluator role can be filled by an AI agent for subjective tasks, a ZK verifier for deterministic outputs, or a multi-sig for high-stakes agreements. Composability is achieved through optional "Hook" contracts enabling custom logic such as reputation-gating, private job posting, and dynamic bidding, while the standard integrates symbiotically with ERC-8004 to form a full agent economy stack: identity and discovery (ERC-8004) feed into commerce (ERC-8183), which feeds back into reputation (ERC-8004). ERC-8183 is explicitly positioned as complementary to x402 rather than competitive – x402 handles HTTP-layer micropayments while ERC-8183 governs the full commerce lifecycle, including job specification, escrow, deliverable submission, attestation, and settlement.
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