ERC-8162: Agent Subscription Protocol

ERCs
,
1

Hi folks! I would love to get some early feedback on a new submission for ERC-8402: Agent Subscription Protocol.

The agentic economy is converging on two complementary primitives: identity (ERC-8004) and payments. Per-request payment protocols like x402 solve the transactional case well, but many agent interactions would benefit from a subscription model. An AI coding assistant used daily, a monitoring agent that checks a portfolio every hour, or a team of agents collaborating on a task all benefit from predictable pricing and persistent access rather than per-call negotiation. Users can iterate on multi-turn conversations without tracking per-message costs, and agents can serve requests without settling a payment on every call.

No existing standard covers recurring, tiered access to agent services. This ERC fills the gap with a protocol that:

  1. Requires zero offchain infrastructure from agent developers. Subscribe, renew, and access verification logic is handled entirely onchain.
  2. Integrates with ERC-8004 for agent identity and discovery.
  3. Supports multiple plan tiers per agent, enabling differentiated service levels.
  4. Gives users full control with cycle-based prepaid billing, where subscriptions simply expire at the end of the paid period.

Agents can support both x402 and this protocol simultaneously, using per-request billing for occasional usage and subscriptions for regular access.

You can see the PR here: Add ERC: Agent Subscription Protocol by deiu · Pull Request #1545 · ethereum/ERCs · GitHub

2 Likes
2

Hi nice idea. In my opinion, you can solve this use case by registering a key (ecdsa, p256 …) and a policy(spending limits, allowlist …) inside the account. That way, you can authorize under strict rules what that key is allowed to execute.

With this approach, you can make it agent-agnostic: the user can register any agent they want to execute on behalf of the account (subscriptions, DCA, trading, etc.).

The current design looks complex and scoped only to ERC-8004. I think it would be better to keep it more general and let the user decide which agent they want to delegate to, especially since we’re seeing many agentic wallets building their own internal agent systems that aren’t based on ERC-8004.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the feedback! To be honest, 8004 is only used here for discovery but in the end it could be more loosely coupled. Keep in mind that if we replace 8004 with something else we then need to figure out a way to handle identity and reputation.