Mantle Deploys ERC-8004 to Drive Autonomous Economy
DUBAI, UAE — February 16, 2026 — Leads & Copy — Mantle has announced the official deployment of the ERC-8004 standard on mainnet. This milestone introduces a trust and identity layer intended to transform AI agents into sovereign economic participants capable of operating across Real World Assets (RWAs), TradFi bridges, and Decentralized Finance (DeFi).
On-chain AI agents have faced a “visibility crisis,” lacking a way to build a reputation across different platforms, approve their historical performance, or be discovered outside of their specific ecosystem. This has prevented autonomous agents from participating in financial markets where verifiable records are required.
By deploying ERC-8004, Mantle is providing infrastructure for an “Internet of Agents.” The standard introduces three on-chain registries:
Identity Registry: Provides an NFT-based on-chain identity for every agent.
Reputation Registry: Establishes a portable track record, allowing an agent’s credit score to follow it across platforms.
Validation Registry: Offers proof of work completed, allowing agents to verify the accuracy of each other’s outputs through stake-secured or ZK-based mechanisms.
According to Joshua Cheong, Head of Product at Mantle, bringing ERC-8004 to their ecosystem will provide AI agents with the credentials they need to manage capital. This is intended to create a verifiable workforce that can navigate compliance, liquidity, and settlement at scale.
The company says that on Mantle, where institutional-grade assets flow, agents can now discover one another, verify credentials, and transact autonomously without being locked into a single platform. This enables:
Financial Strategy Agents: Executing complex yield or trading strategies with an auditable performance history.
RWA Coordination Agents: Managing compliance, custody, and settlement for tokenized assets.
Cross-Market Bridges: Bridging liquidity between traditional legacy systems and on-chain protocols.
Mantle says that ERC-8004 is designed to be backwards-compatible and works in tandem with the protocols agents already use, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication, and the x402 payment standard.
By combining these communication and payment standards with Mantle’s distribution layer and $4B+ treasury, the network is positioned to lead the “DeFAI” (Decentralized AI Finance) revolution.
According to the press release, Ethereum is the settlement layer for AI, and with ERC-8004, the future of autonomous finance is live on Mantle.
Mantle is positioned as a distribution layer and gateway for institutions and TradFi to connect with on-chain liquidity and access real-world assets. Mantle combines credibility, liquidity and scalability with institutional-grade infrastructure to support large-scale adoption.
The ecosystem is anchored by $MNT within Bybit, and built out through core ecosystem projects like mETH, fBTC, MI4 and more. This is complemented by Mantle Network’s partnerships with issuers and protocols such as Ethena USDe, Ondo USDY, and OP-Succinct.
Source: Mantle
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