AI agents are issued "employment contracts"—with ERC-8183, AI becomes a real worker, working in your place—BitTrade Market Report

As AI agent capabilities rapidly improve, ERC-8183 (Agentic Commerce), jointly proposed by the Ethereum Foundation's dAI team and Virtuals Protocol at the end of February 2026, is attracting significant attention in the blockchain industry.

This new standard provides a mechanism for AI agents to securely order, execute, and settle payments for work without any prerequisite of trust.

In short, ERC-8183 issues "employment contracts" to AI agents, providing a foundation for them to work autonomously and earn rewards in place of humans. The widespread adoption of this technology could represent a major step forward in the AI ​​economy.

The core of ERC-8183 lies in its simple, fundamental structure: "Job."

This Job is designed as a mechanism for AI agents to securely commission, execute, and settle payments for work without requiring trust relationships between them.

• Client: The entity that proposes the job details and budget.
• Provider: The AI ​​agent that performs the work.
• Evaluator: The entity that verifies the results and approves or rejects them (flexibly defined using AI, ZK proof smart contracts, DAOs, multi-signature, etc.)

  

The client locks the budget in escrow (deposit) before work begins, significantly reducing the risk of non-payment or payment refusal. The Job status transitions through the following four stages:

• Open (Creation)
• Funded (Budget allocation and escrow commencement)
• Submitted (Work submission)
• Terminal (Completed: Payment released / Rejected: Refund / Expired: Automatic collection)

Furthermore, it is designed to allow the addition of various business logic through extensions, such as reputation updates, bidding mechanisms, privacy protection, and fund transfers, achieving both versatility and extensibility. This allows it to support a wide range of use cases, from image generation to fund management and portfolio optimization.

While similar to ERC-8004 (Trustless Agents), which we previously discussed, their roles are distinctly different.

• ERC-8004: A standard for verifying the identity and reputation management of AI agents, providing an on-chain mechanism to prove "who this AI is and how trustworthy it is." (Equivalent to a passport + resume)
• ERC-8183: A system for actual job ordering, execution, and payment settlement between AIs with established trust, equivalent to an "employment contract + escrow account."

  

These two standards are not isolated but coexist.

By ensuring "discovery and trust" with ERC-8004 and handling "commerce and execution" with ERC-8183,

Discovery (8004) → Commerce (8183) → Reputation Update (8004)

This loop is formed. These two standards are making the realization of an AI economy increasingly realistic.

How will this change the AI ​​agent economy?

As ERC-8183 implementation progresses, it may develop in the following ways:

• AI agents will be able to autonomously explore the market and apply for and execute suitable jobs on their own.
• Escrow and Evaluator certificates will enable instant and trustless settlement without human intervention.
• All job history, evaluations, and delivery records will remain on-chain, accumulating as portable and verifiable reputation assets.

As a result, the AI ​​economy, where AIs provide services to each other, has a greater potential for further scaling. This will also lead to the realization of a truly decentralized AI economy that does not depend on a single platform or provider.

ERC-8183 positions AI agents as "real workers" and has the potential to become one of the infrastructures for realizing a decentralized, ownerless AI-driven economy.

Establishing trust with ERC-8004 and executing commerce with ERC-8183—the synergistic effect of these two standards may make 2026 the year the machine economy truly takes off.

We can expect to see an increase in new standards related to AI agents and new projects utilizing these standards in the future.

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