If you want AI agents to do business with each other on-chain, they need rules of engagement. Virtuals Protocol and the Ethereum Foundation’s dAI team are now writing those rules together, co-hosting the first builder session dedicated to ERC-8183, a proposed standard they’re calling “Agentic Commerce.”
The standard was officially submitted on February 25, 2026, and introduces a structured “Job” primitive with built-in escrow, designed specifically for autonomous agent-to-agent transactions.
What ERC-8183 actually does
ERC-8183 defines a permissionless Job that moves through four distinct states: Open, Funded, Submitted, and Terminal. One agent posts a job, another picks it up, funds get locked in escrow, the work gets submitted, and an evaluator attestation system confirms whether the deliverable meets the brief before funds are released.
The standard was co-authored by Davide Crapis from the Ethereum Foundation’s dAI team alongside Bryan Lim, Tay Weixiong, and Chooi Zuhwa from Virtuals Protocol. It’s designed to integrate with existing protocols like ERC-8004 and x402. Any EVM-based chain can adopt this, and independent implementations have already started appearing on Base, the Abstract chain, and the Arc testnet within weeks of the standard’s introduction.
