Draft ERCs give AI agents units and income records

Two draft Ethereum standards are trying to put accounting structure around AI-driven economic activity. The AIFi Unit Framework draft, assigned ERC-8454, proposes a registry and descriptor model for economic objects in AI economies.

Its core object is a versioned Unit Definition. That unit can represent an agent, skill, task, service, model, compute resource, data, financial position or a nested unit, along with typed relations, ports, authorities and validity windows. The point is to give protocols a shared object to reference when a single AI activity spans multiple components.

AUF runs two registries. AUFUnitRegistry handles units, versions, containment, definition control and acknowledgments. AUFAssertionRegistry handles characterizations, observations, valuations and extensions. The draft also requires ERC-165, EIP-712 and ERC-1271.

A second draft, “Agent Income Statements”, adds a narrower financial record: a profile of the ERC-8004 Reputation Registry that lets a writer post chained statements of what an agent’s ERC-8004 agentWallet received in a single asset.

The accounting window has a specific boundary. It’s cut at the logs of an owner or wallet change — ERC-721 Transfer and MetadataSet(“agentWallet”). The proposal was first raised on ERC-8434’s Agent Identity thread, placing it alongside earlier work on agent identity and reputation registries. ERC-8004 addresses reputation and ERC-8434 addresses identity; the new drafts add a framework for composite economic units and wallet-linked income records.

That boundary matters for anyone reading an agent’s receipts. A wallet change splits the income history into separate windows, and the proposal’s open questions include whether ERC-8004 should require MetadataSet for every agentWallet change. Zealynx wrote on Ethereum Magicians: “Really thorough draft, and cutting windows at the log position instead of the block is the detail most people would miss.”

AUF supplies a vocabulary for defining an economic whole and attaching assertions about it; Agent Income Statements supplies a chained record for one asset and one agent wallet. Together they offer protocol builders and indexers a more consistent basis for describing, valuing and tracking AI-linked activity.

The two drafts represent a move from individual agent primitives toward records that can be compared across economic units. Financial protocols could use that to surface what an agent is, what it controls and what its wallet received.

Unrelated price context: ETH$2,398.57▼2.74% traded at $2,402.52 on October 22, 2026, down 2.6% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. A 2.6% move on $2,402.52 works out to roughly $62.47 ($2,402.52 × 0.026). That arithmetic has no connection to the ERC drafts.