ERC-8004: Trustless Agents

[babyblueviper1]

@blockbird this is the sharpest framing of the bounded-mandate stack I’ve seen, and yes — the witness side is our lane.

One thing worth making load-bearing, because it’s what keeps the composition trustless and not just modular: the three options you list for the witness — re-execution, zkML, TEE oracle — aren’t interchangeable here. If the cursor gates a draw on a TEE/oracle attestation, the bounded mandate has just inherited a trusted party; “validation is the witness” quietly becomes “validation is an oracle you trust.” The version that composes with no trusted layer is the recomputable witness: a signed verdict anyone re-derives from public data (re-execution, or a signature vs a published key), so the cursor trusts the math, not the validator. That’s the property an open-ended economy actually needs — recomputable, not attested.

Concretely, that witness is exactly what we just sketched on the metering side — what advanceCursor gates each draw on:

ERC-1833: Bounded Agent Actions - a metering layer for agent authority

Replying to the co-design invite — here’s a concrete first cut of the seam, with the verify + settlement side already deployed so it isn’t hand-waving. Context: where 1833 sits A few of us (the trustless-ai group) have been converging on a small stack for verifiable economics of specialized agents — an agent acting through MCP tools that has to be both bounded and paid, with every layer recomputable from public data and no layer a trusted party: # layer standard 0 commitment / inclusio…

advanceCursor(witness) checks valid ∧ matches ∧ leaf∈root ∧ within-subcap ∧ unspent, where valid is recomputed on-chain (BIP-340) — never on valid alone, replay-nullified.

And the witness → owner-bound, settle-once half (your “validation supplies the witness that authorizes drawing it down”) is live end-to-end on Sepolia today, via an agent-recovery escrow:

• on-chain verifier (the recompute): Address: 0x7c99c52E...2a50F3b70 | Etherscan Sepolia
• settle-once escrow: Address: 0x71D8E5a2...C69134f59 | Etherscan Sepolia

So the recomputable-verdict primitive is working code; bringing it to Base as a Validation Registry is the productization of that witness side (next step, not live yet — the live reference is the Sepolia flow above). Your 3-piece cut maps cleanly onto it: identity scopes the leaf (8004), the recomputable verdict is the witness (8274/8299), the cursor (1833) holds what’s left, the module settles — no overlap, no trusted layer. “Identity and spend ceiling travel together” is exactly right; glad to converge the witness shape with you and the 1833 profile.