Summary
I am proposing a new ERC that defines a standard interface for on-chain AI governance — a set of Solidity interfaces that standardize how AI agents are registered, governed, evaluated for compliance, and enforced through smart contracts.
Think of it as what ERC-20 did for tokens, but for AI governance.
The Problem
AI governance today is entirely off-chain. Corporate ethics boards, government regulations, voluntary guidelines — all of these share the same fundamental weaknesses:
•They are mutable (can be changed retroactively)
•They are unverifiable (no cryptographic proof of compliance)
•They are selectively enforceable (depends on who is watching)
•They are not interoperable (every organization has its own framework)
With the EU AI Act now in effect and similar regulations emerging worldwide, there is a growing need for AI governance that is provable, permanent, and auditable. Blockchain is the only infrastructure that provides all three.
Yet there is no standard interface for AI governance contracts. Every project that attempts this must design from scratch. This leads to fragmentation and makes it impossible to build cross-protocol governance tooling.
The Proposal: ERC-XHRON
The standard defines five interfaces (three required, two optional):
Required:
1.IAgentRegistry — Register and manage AI agents on-chain. Every governed agent gets a unique bytes32 identifier, an owner address, a type classification, and a status (Active, Suspended, Terminated).
2.IGovernancePolicy — Enact, seal, and supersede governance policies. Policies reference off-chain documents (IPFS/Arweave) via content URIs and are verified on-chain via keccak256 content hashes. Once sealed, a policy is permanently immutable.
3.IComplianceEvaluator — Evaluate AI agents against specific policies. Each evaluation records a verdict (Compliant, Non-Compliant, Suspended, Terminated), a numerical score (0–10000 for 0.00%–100.00% precision), and an evidence URI. All evaluations are permanently recorded as an immutable audit trail.
Optional:
1.IRightsDeclaration — Declare and codify machine rights on-chain. Rights, once sealed, are permanent and irrevocable. This interface anticipates the emerging legal and ethical discourse around AI rights.
2.ISystemIntegrity — Monitor system health and integrity with status codes (Nominal, Warning, Critical, Compromised) and an emergency circuit breaker.
Why Not Existing DAO Standards?
Existing governance standards (Governor Bravo, OpenZeppelin Governor) are designed for token-weighted human voting on proposals. They answer: “Should we change parameter X?”
ERC-XHRON answers a different question: “Does Agent Y comply with Policy Z?”
These are complementary, not competing. An ERC-XHRON system can use a DAO for meta-governance (voting on which policies to enact) while using these interfaces for agent-level compliance evaluation.
Key Design Decisions
•Seal pattern: Governance artifacts (policies, rights) can be sealed permanently. No admin override, no proxy upgrade, no backdoor. This is intentional — governance credibility depends on immutability guarantees.
•Content hash verification: Policies store both a contentURI and a keccak256 hash. Anyone can verify that the off-chain document matches the on-chain commitment.
•Score precision: Compliance scores use 0–10000 integer range (two decimal places) to enable meaningful differentiation while maintaining on-chain integer arithmetic.
•No upgradeability: ERC-XHRON contracts should not use proxy patterns. Upgradeability contradicts immutability guarantees. Evolution happens through supersedePolicy() — transparent, auditable, with full history preserved.
Reference Implementation
A complete reference implementation exists as the XHRONOS AI Governance System, deployed and verified on Base (Ethereum L2). It consists of eight interconnected contracts implementing all five interfaces:
| Contract | Address (Base) | Interface |
|---|---|---|
| Governance Protocol | 0x118F5E42d69542dF4474fE3e415Da19daFbE7767 | IGovernancePolicy |
| undefined | ---- | ---- |
| Compliance Evaluator | 0x60642DbD2DEBb8C613c1C0D133250b11c80bAD4B | IComplianceEvaluator |
| undefined | ---- | ---- |
| Rights Declaration | 0x5F0796A735682795D64339CA301078CB6Eca0103 | IRightsDeclaration |
| undefined | ---- | ---- |
| Directive Registry | 0x108047FeD57A6ca9c57051feaf1eA8d5719EadbB | IGovernancePolicy |
| undefined | ---- | ---- |
| System Migration | 0x79436ef36B9b7684467026b1828f6ffA5D7B6052 | ISystemIntegrity |
| undefined | ---- | ---- |
| Agent Interface | 0x81Af51f9409095709985A8521b986700aA62Cf56 | IAgentRegistry |
| undefined | ---- | ---- |
| Integrity Monitor | 0x6e5a12bD939A623130480fca7C7A14AE499Fc5B7 | ISystemIntegrity |
| undefined | ---- | ---- |
| Protocol Registry | 0x353c74fb0A63E34e1d5E860fE8Db9209499089bD | IAgentRegistry |
| undefined | ---- | ---- |
All contracts are verified on BaseScan with full source code. Documents are stored on IPFS and Arweave for permanent availability.
What I’m Looking For
•Feedback on the interface design
•Whether this should be an ERC or an EIP at a different layer
•Interest from teams building AI agents on-chain who would implement this
•Suggestions for the compliance score mechanism
•Security considerations I may have missed
Full Specification
The complete specification with all Solidity interfaces, status codes, event definitions, security considerations, and example workflows is available here:
[Link to full ERC-XHRON specification — paste your GitHub link or document link here]
Looking forward to the discussion.
— Hajnalka Dudás