ERC-8004
The emerging Ethereum standard for verifiable agent identity, provenance and reputation. This is a blockchain question and a narrow one — if you are asking how a caller authenticates to your own system, that is a different mechanism.
A layer above the engine. Built and demonstrated; we deploy it where a customer needs it.
The problem starts at the boundary
Your agent calls a partner's service. Theirs calls yours to settle something. SSO, roles and your directory stop at your own edge, and none of it tells the other side which agent it is talking to, what that agent was authorized to do, or what it actually did afterwards.
Centralized identity does not cross company boundaries. A shared registry means somebody has to own it and everyone has to trust the owner.
Where crypto forced the question first
Anywhere else, a bad cross-boundary decision can be undone with a phone call and a reversal. On chain it cannot be, and agents are already moving funds, signing transactions and calling each other's contracts without a human in between. So the identity question became real there first, and the answer being built is a public standard rather than a vendor's registry.
ERC-8004 gives an agent an identity a counterparty can check without asking anyone's permission and without a database in the middle.
What we do with it
The hard half already exists in the engine: every decision an agent makes lands in a hash-chained, tamper-evident record. On top of that we sign those records and register the agent's identity and provenance to ERC-8004.
A counterparty can then answer two questions without trusting a middleman: is this really your agent, and did it really decide that. The second is the one a shared registry cannot answer, because the record is signed rather than only stored.
Zero trust, applied to agents
No agent trusted by default. Identity checked on every interaction. Authority stated and limited — which is authentication and authorization, one page over. Every action provable afterwards, which is the record. What this page adds is verification by someone who is not you.
Where this stands
We have built it and demonstrated it end to end. If agents crossing trust boundaries is a real problem for you, it is worth a conversation early, while the shape of the standard is still being set.