ERC-8004: Trust, Money, and Machines
Over the last 3–4 months of 2025, I’ve been rethinking many things. During that time, I made a simple decision: not to spend energy on anything that doesn’t add value to society, and not to invest time in something I’m not passionate about. In that same spirit, I asked God to guide my path.
A small disclaimer: in this blog, I’m going to connect ideas that may seem unrelated. But if we look closely, patterns start to appear. And the pattern that interests me most today, more than ever, is this:
trust.
Once you decide to serve, everything that crosses your path begins to feel like part of the same purpose. And with that, you learn to pay attention even to the smallest things — sometimes, the small things carry the signal.
Along that path, a YouTube video about Al-Ghazālī appeared. It spoke about ideas written centuries ago on economics and the morality of money — and how they remain relevant despite time. One idea kept echoing in my mind:
When people lose trust, the economy breaks.
That phrase immediately brought memories: Argentina’s corralito, Venezuela’s situation, and even current discussions about the dollar. I don’t say this as a prediction, but as an intuition: when trust erodes, the world slowly starts looking for alternatives, like someone preparing for a change of era.
And then comes the almost inevitable question:
What does all this have to do with technology?
At the same time, AI agents crossed my mind, along with two pieces I’ve been following recently — not for long, since they’re relatively new — but they coincided with the personal rethinking I mentioned earlier. Coincidence, perhaps. These are ERC-8004 and x402.
And that’s where the connection that led me to write this blog appeared: the possibility that technology could help solve — at least partially — a deeply human problem that repeats over and over again:
distrust, corruption, collusion, cheating… and the social cost they leave behind.
Money as a Moral Tool
Money is a moral tool: it should measure value and facilitate exchange.
It should not be an end in itself, nor treated as a commodity.
I grew up reading Western classics: Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Nietzsche, Descartes… That’s why I was so surprised to encounter a Middle Eastern thinker speaking about economics with brutal clarity — but from a different perspective: not as “technique,” but as applied ethics, deeply tied to religion.
While researching, I discovered something I had ignored: there was a golden age in that region with an extraordinary density of thinkers. I knew of Rumi, who is more recent, but not much beyond that.
Who Was Al-Ghazālī?
Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) was a theologian, jurist, and Sufi philosopher from medieval Iran. His most famous work, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, blends theology, ethics, and economics.
For Al-Ghazālī, material well-being is subordinate to moral values: wealth should serve real human needs and sustain social justice. He lived in a commercially active world — trade routes between Asia and the Mediterranean, dinars and dirhams circulating — and from there he observed a crucial point:
When wealth separates from morality, the social fabric erodes.
Reputation and Trust
If we think about it, trust in everyday life works in a simple way: through social reputation.
At least in Latin America, finding a plumber or mechanic can feel like roulette. And the question that always appears is:
“Do you know someone trustworthy you can recommend?”
That question isn’t trivial. Deep down, what’s being sought isn’t price or warranty — it’s history. Someone who’s been there before and didn’t fail.
And here comes the part that excites me:
I believe standards like ERC-8004, despite their immaturity and imperfections, point toward something big: replicating on the internet the basic mechanism of human trust, but with verifiable rules.
ERC-8004 proposes that agents have:
verifiable identity
portable reputation
validation mechanisms
And x402 adds another essential piece:
pay-per-request payments
friction-light micropayments
a native way to monetize services on the internet
Together, these ideas feel like the beginning of something: a market where agents exchange services with other agents, and where trust doesn’t rely only on “belief,” but on public signals, history, and verification.
Here is where protocols like MCP and A2A enter the scene — and surely more will follow.
An Inevitable Future (and a Responsibility)
This is where my view becomes more personal.
My commitment to contributing and building this interaction layer — replicating social behavior, but among agents — excites me like few things. I can’t predict the future, but I do see the trend: machines will exchange goods and services with machines, in a layer almost invisible to humans, much like the internet today.
And if we are creating them in our image and likeness, they will also inherit our worst behaviors: corruption in new forms, identity forgery, sybil attacks, and more.
Sometimes I project this 100 years forward, and it’s overwhelming: building today is building the future. And those of us working with technology — engineers, builders — hold something close to a superpower.
And we already know how that sentence ends:
With great power comes great responsibility.
I don’t know how all this will evolve in the coming years.
But it’s impossible not to feel excited when thinking about it.