2026-04-10 –, Limmat (Y15-G-60)
Autonomous AI agents are increasingly capable of acting on behalf of users, yet most of today’s digital infrastructure still assumes a human counterparty. APIs block automated access, payment systems rely on accounts and subscriptions, and trust is enforced through closed platforms rather than open standards. The limiting factor is no longer intelligence, but the lack of primitives for verifiable identity, reputation, and machine-native payments.
This talk examines two emerging standards — ERC-8004 and x402 — and argues that together they form a foundational coordination layer for agentic commerce on Ethereum. ERC-8004 introduces a crypto-native framework for agent discovery, identity, and reputation, enabling agents to establish trust and assess counterparties without prior relationships or centralized intermediaries. x402 complements this by enabling HTTP-native, chain-agnostic micropayments, allowing agents to pay for digital services programmatically, per request, and with instant settlement.
Rather than focusing on applications or agent frameworks, the session takes a standards-level view: why autonomous agents require different economic abstractions than humans, how identity and payments interact at machine scale, and why traditional payment rails and platform-based trust models fail in low-value, high-frequency agent-to-agent interactions.
The talk further argues that Ethereum’s execution environment, stablecoin liquidity, and standards-driven governance uniquely position it as a neutral settlement and trust layer for autonomous economic actors. By combining verifiable agent identity with atomic, programmable payments, Ethereum enables open markets for agent services that are composable, auditable, and not controlled by any single platform.
The goal is to ground discussions of the “agentic economy” in concrete Ethereum primitives, highlighting how deliberately boring infrastructure — not larger models or closed ecosystems — will determine whether autonomous agents can participate safely and permissionlessly in open markets.
Darius Moukhtarzadeh is a Research Strategist at 21shares, one of the largest and earliest issuers of crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs). Prior to joining 21Shares, he worked at Sygnum Bank, the world’s first regulated crypto bank, as well as Ernst & Young Blockchain and several startups in Switzerland’s Crypto Valley. Active in the blockchain space since 2016, Darius has experience as an angel investor, advisor, founder, and author. He holds a Master’s degree in Business Innovation from the University of St. Gallen (HSG) and the University of California, Berkeley.