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. According to reports from PNF, 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. The standard addresses a critical gap in AI agent infrastructure by providing a portable, EIP-712-based attestation envelope that enables any sufficiently decentralized network to implement the standard and be verified by any client using the same code.
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. The proposal defines that missing interface by standardizing the contract surface and a portable, EIP-712-based attestation envelope, ensuring strictly additive, broadly composable functionality that works with existing ERC-8004 implementations. As reported by PNF, the extension does not modify ERC-8004's Validation Registry contract, ensuring existing single-address validators continue to work unchanged, with aggregated responses written back through the registry's existing functions.
A central design principle is the treatment of operator diversity as an explicit, enforceable policy parameter that addresses a fundamental security concern. According to the proposal, 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, with the specification noting that multi-validator selection where every validator shares one operator is collusion by default. The proposal is candid about the limits of that guarantee, noting that a contract can count distinct operators but cannot prove they are independent, with the strength of the diversity claim reducing 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.
ERC-8294 does not modify ERC-8004's Validation Registry contract, ensuring existing single-address validators continue to work unchanged while providing a standardized interface for multi-operator validation. 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. The extension is designed to compose with ERC-8004, not to replace or compete with any part of it, offering clients a portable way to request and verify multi-operator validation regardless of which network they use.
The proposal 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. According to Chris "Jinx" Jenkins, Managing Director at Pocket Network Foundation and co-author of the proposal, "AI agents operating on Ethereum need a trust layer that reflects the same decentralization values the network was built on." The standard gives any decentralized network the interface it needs to serve that role and provides any AI agent client a portable way to request and verify multi-operator validation, regardless of which network it uses. 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.
