ERC-8004: Trustless Agents

ERCs
137

  1. @debug-0 the problem you describe, “financial identity locked to a custodian’s signing key rather than portable under the agent’s own identity” is exactly the class of issues that motivated us to formalize a delegation layer.

    We have published a draft ERC that addresses this: ERC-8226: Regulated Agent Mandate (RAMS)(https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/regulated-agent-mandate-standard-rams/28208).

    RAMS defines how a verified principal delegates scoped, time-bounded, financially capped authority to an on-chain agent, and how regulated token contracts verify mandate validity through their existing pre-transfer compliance hook before executing agent-initiated transfers. The standard is agnostic to both the agent identity system and the token compliance framework, it works with any agent registry that provides a wallet-to-agent mapping (ERC-8004 being a natural fit) and any regulated token standard with a pre-transfer compliance check (such as ERC-7943 or ERC-3643).

    To your specific question: the core mechanism that addresses the custodian-key attribution problem is getActivePrincipal(agentId). When a RAMS-aware token sees an agent-initiated transfer, it resolves the beneficial owner (the principal) through the RAMS registry rather than relying on the signing key. The mandate itself, not the key that signs the transaction, carries the authority. This means if the enterprise migrates custodians, the mandate history and principal attribution stay with the agentId, not with the old custodian’s infrastructure key.

    The dual compliance check pattern reinforces this: the token first runs its own investor eligibility check on the principal (the token’s compliance module is never bypassed), then verifies the RAMS mandate validity on the agent. The base identity layer stays clean, the enforcement layer composes on top. No modifications to any existing standard are required.

  2. GitHub PR: https://github.com/ethereum/ERCs/pull/1679

    Feedback are welcome, especially on the dual compliance check pattern and the custody model open topic (agent-custodied vs principal-custodied tokens).