Kudos to the authors @davidecrapis.eth and @Marco-MetaMask for the great work on this standard.
As we build out commercial applications on top of ERC-8004, we’ve been thinking about the full lifecycle of agent interactions, especially what happens when things go wrong.
A recent article from the Cooperative AI Foundation (comparing agent governance to maritime law) highlighted a key piece of infrastructure for any mature autonomous system: incident reporting. Just as ships have a standard way to report collisions or signal distress, autonomous agents need a standardized, on-chain way to report failures, disputes, or malicious behavior.
The current standard is excellent for verifying successful work, but it lacks a simple primitive for flagging failures. A potential direction could be to add a simple, lightweight function to the ValidationRegistry or a new, dedicated IncidentRegistry:
reportIncident(targetAgentID, reasonCode, dataHash)
targetAgentID: The agent being reported.reasonCode: A standardized enum for the type of incident (e.g.,0: Non-responsive,1: MalformedData,2: RuleViolation,3: MaliciousBehavior).dataHash: An optional storage ID pointing to off-chain evidence supporting the incident report.
Of course, the immediate question is: how do you prevent this from being misused for spam or griefing attacks?
The solution is to use a simple crypto-economic mechanism to disincentivize false reporting. The workflow could be:
- Report with a Bond: To call
reportIncident, the reporting agent must post a small bond (e.g., in USDC). This immediately prices out frivolous spam. - Challenge Period: The report enters a “pending” state for a short time. The accused agent can challenge it by posting their own counter-bond.
- Resolution:
- If Unchallenged: The report becomes “active,” the reporter’s bond is returned, and the incident becomes a public signal.
- If Challenged: The dispute is escalated to a pluggable, off-chain arbitration service. The winner takes both bonds.
This model creates a strong incentive for honest reporting. You can pull the fire alarm, but there’s a cost to being wrong.
This stays within the minimal ethos of the ERC: the on-chain part is just a simple state machine (pending/active) with a bond, while the complex logic of arbitration is left to external systems. It adds a crucial safety layer for the whole agent economy.
Just a thought on a small addition that could have a significant impact on the overall safety and reliability of the agent economy.
PS: we’re leading the reference implementation that will bring ERC-8004 to life and have released the first demo.