If you are trying to work out how to bound what an autonomous agent may do on-chain, you
will find a dozen ERCs that sound like they answer the question. Most of them answer a
different one. Working out which is which took me a week, so here is the map, with the
method attached so you can check it rather than trust it.
This is not a critique of anyone’s work. Several of the standards below deliberately
exclude what I was looking for, and say so.
Method
Titles are misleading in this space — “agent”, “delegation” and “permission” appear in
proposals that have nothing to do with each other. So I ranked the corpus by content.
Every ERC in ethereum/ERCs was listed (611 files), those numbered ≥ 7000 kept
(271), their full text downloaded (~5.1 MB) and scored against 11 concept patterns:
delegation, attenuation, sub-agent, inheritance, cap, revocation, expiry, identity,
AI-agent, caveat, session. The top of that ranking was then read end to end —
specification and discussion thread, not abstracts. Five threads, 73 posts.
The ranking is a filter, not a verdict. ERC-7303 scored third and is a false positive —
token-based role access control, nothing to do with agents.
Scope limit, stated up front. The corpus is the merged ethereum/ERCs tree. Open
pull requests and forum-only drafts are outside it — ERC-8165 (PR #1549, open since
February) is one such case, and it sits on the intent/solver layer rather than this one.
The map
(thread activity as of 13 August 2026)
| ERC | What it actually does | Status | Thread |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8226 Regulated Agent Mandate | A principal grants a scoped, capped, time-bounded mandate to one agent, checked inside a regulated token’s existing pre-transfer hook. Per-transaction and cumulative caps, freeze, compliance provider. | Draft | live — 12 posts, last 2026-08-12 |
| 8196 AI Agent Authenticated Wallet | Executes only with cryptographic proof that the action complies with an owner-defined policy. Hash-chained audit trail, entropy commit-reveal against host manipulation. Layer 2 of a stack with ERC-8126. | Final | 14 posts, last 2026-07-20 |
| 8199 Sandboxed Smart Wallet | Containment by isolation: the agent’s wallet fully detached from the owner’s, the relationship one-directional. | Draft | dormant — 2 posts, 93 views |
| 8273 Attestation-Gated Agentic Actions | Per-operation attestation, authorized in EIP-1153 transient storage and cleared at the end of the transaction. | Draft | — |
| 7715 Request Permissions from Wallets | The request side: a JSON-RPC method for a dapp to ask a wallet for permissions. Requires 4337 and 7710. | Draft | 10 posts, last 2026-04-29 |
| 7710 Smart Contract Delegation | A single function, redeemDelegations, for redeeming a delegation against a Delegation Manager. |
Draft | dormant — 35 posts, 6.2k views, last 2025-04-30 |
Three things that are easy to get wrong from the abstracts:
8273 is not a session system. Its own text: “There is no expiration mechanism, and
there are no long-lived or session-based attestations.” Authorization exists for one
transaction. If you need state that outlives a call, this is the wrong axis — not a weaker
version of the right one.
7710 does not specify caveats. The ERC is one function. Caveat enforcement, delegation
chains and revocation appear only as features of the MetaMask Delegation Framework, its
reference implementation. The standard also declares acquisition out of scope: “The
process by which a delegate obtains a delegation is intentionally left out of scope.” Its
Security Considerations section currently ends with Needs discussion. <!-- TODO -->.
8196 is Final. Whatever you think of it, it is not going to change.
The empty square
None of the 271 standardizes attenuated re-delegation: a child agent that comes into
existence already bounded by its parent, on every clause, with the bound non-strippable.
The closest candidate is ERC-8226, and it is worth being precise about why it is not that.
Its mandate is keyed by (agent, principal); only the principal can grant. An agent holding
a valid mandate cannot create anything. Searching its reference implementation for the
vocabulary of lineage —
grep -rniE "child|parent|sub-?agent|inherit|lineage|spawn|attenuat" contracts/ test/
— returns only @inheritdoc, a Solidity documentation tag. The concept is absent from the
code, not merely from the prose.
That is not a defect. @thamerdridi made the point directly on my own thread, and was
right to: a spawned child inherits nothing under RAMS, including the authority to act, so
reproduction cannot be used to escape a mandate. Inheritance is out of scope by design. The
honest phrasing is “ERC-8226 does not define mandate inheritance”, not “ERC-8226 can be
bypassed.”
The same care applies to the others. 8199 refuses granular sharing on principle, arguing
that session-key-style approaches “inherently bring in permission evasion issues”. 8273 is
transaction-scoped by construction. 7715 is a request protocol, not an enforcement layer.
None of these is an oversight; they are four different answers to four different questions.
The square is empty because nobody has claimed it, not because everybody missed it.
Reproduce it
gh api repos/ethereum/ERCs/contents/ERCS --paginate | jq -r '.[].name'
curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ethereum/ERCs/master/ERCS/erc-8226.md
curl -s "https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/28208.json?include_raw=true&print=true"
ERC-8226’s reference implementation compiles and its own test suite passes — 72 tests, 0
failures — with OpenZeppelin resolved from master (the v5.1.0 tag does not exist) and
forge-std supplied locally. Worth doing: reading a specification and running it are not
the same activity, and the second one is cheap.
Disclosure
I work on ERC-8370, which is an attempt at the empty square. That is why I read all of
this, and you should weigh the map accordingly — though every claim above is checkable with
the three commands in the previous section, which is rather the point.
Corrections welcome, especially from the authors of anything listed here. If I have
mischaracterized your standard’s scope, say so and I will fix it — the version I keep
updated lives at interop/standards-map.md in the ERC-8370 repository.