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The Ethereum Foundation has created a new research and engineering unit called the dAI Team. The group is tasked with making it easier for autonomous AI agents to pay, coordinate, and settle on Ethereum. Research scientist Davide Crapis announced the initiative on Sept. 15 and framed it as a way to connect blockchain and AI economies with a focus on payments and decentralization.
Early priorities include standards and trust. The team is advancing work on ERC-8004, a proposal aimed at proving the integrity of AI agents and their outputs. The broader goal is to establish common rails so agents can transact without intermediaries while retaining Ethereum’s properties of neutrality, verifiability, and censorship resistance. CoinDesk’s coverage notes the emphasis on payments, coordination, and open standards as pillars of the roadmap.
The move lands as large tech firms and crypto companies push toward agentic payments. Google just introduced an Agent Payments Protocol known as AP2 that is designed to let AI agents complete purchases using stablecoins and conventional rails. Industry rundowns also highlight Coinbase as a contributor to emerging specifications for agent payments. Together these efforts point to a near term convergence between AI agents and programmable money.
Context from prior reporting shows the Foundation has been laying groundwork for this direction through protocol upgrades and research on AI-linked use cases. EF writers described the new team’s mandate in July updates and repeated the objective of linking Ethereum to AI driven applications that require verifiable settlement. The dAI Team formalizes that push and gives developers a clear point of contact for standards and infrastructure.
If the effort succeeds, developers could build agents that can hold balances, pay for services, and prove actions on chain with less friction. The next milestones to watch are draft specifications, test networks, and reference implementations that demonstrate secure payments between agents and human users. The competitive question is whether Ethereum can become the default settlement layer for AI commerce before proprietary stacks lock in market share.
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