The Trustless Agentic Economy with ERC 8004 and x402 I Ed Marquez

Thu, Jul 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

In this workshop, Ed Marquez walks through the three foundational layers needed for a trustless agentic economy: identity (ERC-7804), communication (Google's A2A protocol now under the Linux Foundation), and payments (X2X). He frames the vision of a near-future agentic web where AI agents discover, communicate with, and pay each other autonomously, and demonstrates how these three open protocols together enable that economy. Ed does live coding demos showing each layer. For A2A, he shows how agents expose an agent card describing their skills, capabilities, and streaming support. For X2X, he demonstrates how just 15 lines of middleware can gate any Express endpoint behind stablecoin micropayments, using Cloudflare's pay per crawl initiative with publishers as a real world example. He walks through the facilitator architecture that separates blockchain execution from business logic, then combines A2A with X2X to create an AI agent that charges 1/10th of a cent per stock summary query. For ERC-7804, he covers the three registries: identity (NFT-based), reputation (score-based feedback with optional IPFS or HCS-stored details), and validation, explaining how server agents authorize clients to leave signed feedback, creating verifiable reputation that lets autonomous agents safely discover and trust each other. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Three Pillars of the Agentic Economy 02:26 Technologies: ERC-7804, A2A, X2X 02:49 GitHub Repo Walkthrough 03:33 A2A Agents and Agent Cards 05:14 A2A Client Setup 06:00 Introduction to X2X Protocol 07:12 X2X for Micropayments and Pay Per Crawl 08:19 Implementing X2X Middleware 10:00 Combining A2A with X2X Payments 11:47 X2X Facilitator Architecture 13:33 Client Side X2X Integration 15:30 Live Demo: AI Agent with Paid A2A Endpoint 17:14 Verifying the Transaction on Hashscan 17:54 The Trust Problem in Autonomous Agents 19:46 Introduction to ERC-7804 20:58 The Three Registries: Identity, Reputation, Validation 22:23 Validation Registry Explained 23:16 Live Demo: Registering an Agent on ERC-7804 24:38 Minting the Identity NFT 25:54 Setting Agent Metadata and Trust Mechanisms 27:47 Reputation Feedback Flow 28:39 Authorizing Feedback with Signed Tokens 29:34 Feedback URIs: IPFS vs Hedera Consensus Service 31:20 Closing and Discord Call to Action _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _