PNF drives the authoring of ERC-8294, a draft extension to ERC-8004 allowing permissionless, operator-diverse validator networks to serve as the trust layer for AI agents

Pocket Network Foundation (PNF), the nonprofit organization stewarding one of the largest decentralized node infrastructure networks in Web3, today announced that ERC-8294, “Validation Network for ERC-8004,” has been submitted as a draft standard to the Ethereum ERCs repository. 

The proposal is co-authored by contributors from PNF and Synaptika and is now under review by Ethereum’s ERC editors, with open discussion underway on Ethereum Magicians.

ERC-8294 extends ERC-8004, Ethereum’s emerging standard for trustless AI agents, with IValidationNetwork: a standard smart contract interface that allows a network of independent validators, rather than a single address, to serve as the trust layer for AI agent verification within ERC-8004’s Validation Registry.

Closing a gap in AI agent infrastructure

ERC-8004’s Validation Registry is intentionally unopinionated about who validates an AI agent, a deliberate choice that lets many validator implementations emerge and compete. In practice, teams building multi-validator setups have had to design their own selection rules, attestation formats, and verification paths from scratch, with no shared standard for interoperability. Clients integrating with more than one network must write per-network verification code.

ERC-8294 defines that missing interface. It standardizes the contract surface and a portable, EIP-712-based attestation envelope, so that any sufficiently decentralized network, whether a permissionless RPC network, a restaking-based Actively Validated Service (AVS), a TEE consortium, or a decentralized oracle network, can implement the standard and be verified by any client using the same code. The proposal does not prescribe any selection algorithm, incentive model, or slashing model; it defines only the interface.

Operator diversity as a first-class parameter

A central design principle is the treatment of operator diversity as an explicit, enforceable policy parameter. Callers can specify not only how many validators must attest to an agent’s behavior, but how many distinct, independent operators those validators must be drawn from, a security distinction that existing approaches leave implicit or unenforced. As the spec puts it, multi-validator selection where every validator shares one operator is collusion by default.

The proposal is candid about the limits of that guarantee: a contract can count distinct operators but cannot prove they are independent. The strength of the diversity claim therefore reduces to the credibility of each network’s published operator-identification methodology and concentration analysis, which ERC-8294 requires networks to publish alongside their deployed contracts.

Strictly additive, broadly composable

ERC-8294 does not modify ERC-8004’s Validation Registry contract. Existing single-address validators continue to work unchanged, and aggregated responses are written back through the registry’s existing functions, preserving compatibility with current indexers and explorers. The extension is designed to compose with ERC-8004, not to replace or compete with any part of it.

The live reference implementation built against the Pocket Network supplier set, a permissionless network of approximately 5,000 supplier nodes operated across multiple independent operators, with pseudo-random selection from the active session set, will accompany the v1 specification in a companion repository. It is offered as one of several possible implementations, not as a privileged one.

“AI agents operating on Ethereum need a trust layer that reflects the same decentralization values the network was built on,” said Chris “Jinx” Jenkins, Managing Director at Pocket Network Foundation and a co-author of the proposal. “This standard gives any decentralized network the interface it needs to serve that role, and gives any AI agent client a portable way to request and verify multi-operator validation, regardless of which network it uses.”

ERC-8294 is co-authored by Chris “Jinx” Jenkins (Pocket Network Foundation), Luis Correa de León (Synaptika), Bryan White (Pocket Network Community Engineering), and Tiago Merlini, author of ERC-8299 and ERC-8309. The draft is available in the Ethereum ERCs repository, with the canonical specification and reference materials maintained by PNF, and discussion is open on Ethereum Magicians.

ERC-8294 | Discussion | Pending merge

About Pocket Network Foundation

Pocket Network Foundation is a nonprofit organization that provides decentralized RPC infrastructure connecting applications to blockchain data through a permissionless network of thousands of independent node operators worldwide.

Source: BeInCrypto