Self-custody in the Era of Agents

It’s still day one for agents. Adoption is nascent, curiosity relentless, and the frontier wide open. Beyond today’s chatty companions, expect a consumer wave: trading agents that rebalance, hedge, and stake within your guardrails; gaming agents that play when you’re offline—grinding dailies, farming resources, and coordinating squads; travel agents that actually book and settle; shopping agents that compare, size, and ship; entertainment agents that plan nights out—tickets, rides, receipts included; and hybrid retail flows that start on your phone and end at your doorstep.

On the B2B side, the first agents to reach mass adoption will likely cluster where LLMs already perform best: creative agents and analyst agents.

Why Web3

Blockchains help in three ways:

Payment layer. Blockchains are the native settlement layer for agents: global, fast, inexpensive, and natively programmable. “Money-lego” composability is exactly what agents need to buy, pay other agents, and meter usage.

Trustless capabilities. The most interesting agent use cases are the ones that cannot be built on centralized rails. DeFi thrived because users could trust the EVM without trusting whoever deployed the code. Similarly, trustless agents enable high-stakes automation (e.g., trading agents rebalancing hundreds of millions), confidential compute over personal or enterprise data, and personal digital twins—without surrendering custody or control to a platform.

Decentralized infrastructure. Blockchains can coordinate decentralized compute and data markets—fuel for training, inference, and context engineering—while keeping incentives and attribution transparent.

What Matters

For consumers

• Seamless experience. People should interact with any agent directly from their preferred AI interface—no walled-garden agent platforms—and pay right there, frictionlessly.

• Self-custody. Users should remain in control of their assets, and delegate spending to agents safely, with granular control and revocation at all times.

• Privacy-preserving. Users should remain in control of their data and memory.

For developers

• Interoperability. Open standards so agents can be instantly discoverable, and transact with any other agent.

• Permissionless markets. Deploy and use agents without trusted intermediaries.

• Composability. Open, trustless environments with modular agents you can plug together—accelerating combinatorial innovation.

Making It Real

Unified payments

Today, Consensys announces its commitment to supporting x402—the open-source standard for micropayments and agentic payments initially proposed by Coinbase—and to expanding the x402 spec as a contributor.

We believe a single, interoperable payment standard is essential for agents to buy and sell digital resources and services.

We will help evolve x402 with strengths from our product strategy: broad optionality and self-custody-grade safety. Today, x402 is effectively USDC-only and primarily used on Base. 

We’re pushing the standard toward multi-asset, multi-chain flows so agents can pay and get paid in whatever currency and network the use case demands. On safety, we’ll work to pair what x402 flows already use—ERC-3009 (transferWithAuthorization)—with delegated spending via ERC-7710. Delegations let users define precise spend scopes for agents—which assets, how much, over what time window, and to whom—with wallet-native approval and revocation. One open rail, many assets/chains, strong policy controls—automation without giving up keys.

Our products will increasingly support x402 and Google Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) more in general. And already today, Consensys’ Decentralized Infrastructure Network (DIN) supports x402 micropayments, so agents can autonomously purchase RPC access on demand.

Want to know more about x402? You can start from our example repo.

Open economies of agents

Open agent economies require instant discoverability and trust signals so anyone can permissionlessly interact with agents they can rely on.

That’s why MetaMask is the proponent—alongside the Ethereum Foundation, and others—of “ERC-8004 Trustless Agents”, which enable an open, cross-organization agent economy: it adds on-chain registries where agents publish capabilities and metadata, standardized invocation and settlement interfaces, and portable reputation.

Trust is established through:

• Reputation models (customer feedback and on-chain attestations),

• Stake-secured inference (independent validators re-execute or verify agent actions),

• Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) (hardware attestations)

Deploying your agents to conform with ERC-8004 makes them visible across any compatible explorer or marketplace, bootstrapping a global, open economy of agents. We expect the Ethereum ecosystem—and Linea, our zk-powered L2 with zk finality—to be the home for agent workflows.

Self-custody

Today, the MetaMask Delegation Toolkit is already the best way to give agents controlled powers over assets—without creating a separate “AI wallet.” Delegations let you define precise limits within which an agent can operate (budgets, assets, time windows). They can also be multi-hop: one agent can delegate narrowly scoped authority to another to purchase a service on your behalf.

User-owned data matters just as much as user-owned assets: we’re exploring ways for people to interact with agents while keeping control of their data—and their long-term memory.

What’s Next

The right time to build and experiment is now. We’re working hard to give you the primitives to express your creativity—as shown in a prototype built by a community member, which combines Google login (via our embedded wallet) for agents SRP-less key management, the Delegation Toolkit for the account controlling the agent, and ERC-8004 for deployment and feedback exchange among agents.

If you’re building Web3 agents, join the ERC-8004 community to get support and collaborate with other builders. In collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation and other partners, we’ll be kicking off a Trustless Agents builder program, culminating in initiatives at DevConnect we will announce soon.

The era of agents is just beginning—we can’t wait to build it together.