Don’t miss the exciting conversation between @pratikmxyz and @gathin_twt from @0G_labs ! Dive into 0G’s road to mainnet, decentralized AI, and the future of Web3. Video link :

@0G_labs is proposing a new NFT standard for agent which is discussed here ( In this post, I am going to briefly describe its rationale behind. With the increasing intelligence of AI models, agents have become more and more powerful to be able to help people process meaningful daily tasks autonomously. In blockchain industry, a lot of projects have provided functionality to create agents for their users. The trend will continue and “agent x crypto” has been recognized as the biggest narrative in the next few years. Currently, one key thing that is still missing is the management of the ownership of an agent in a decentralized way. I believe @ai16zdao @shawmakesmagic share the same opinion with us. Specifically, when you create an agent on a platform like @virtuals_io or @CryptoEternalAI , there is no on-chain information that can acknowledge that the agent you created does belong to you. We think that a key solution to this problem is something like NFT. NFT is a smart contract technology to help users manage their ownership of non-fungible assets. We see that an agent has non-fungible property either. Every agent can be treated as unique to others. It also has ownership property to its creator. An NFT token may have some metadata that can usually be a unique image representing its appearance. Likewise, an agent may also have some metadata that defines its capability. This metadata may include the neural network model, the memory, and the character of the agent. Therefore, it seems natural to associate an agent with an NFT token. However, there is a challenge to simply use the existing NFT standard like ERC-721 to abstract the agent. One of the major reasons is as follows. When transferring an agent NFT token, we are not only transferring the tokenId ownership, but also transferring the ownership of the metadata. And the metadata of an agent is so valuable (it could be the major purpose of this transfer) that it is often stored in a private environment or in a public environment with encryption. Therefore, the actual transferring of the agent metadata needs to be done in a privacy-preserving and verifiable manner. ERC-721 lacks the capability of fulfilling this way of transferring. @0G_labs , therefore, propose a new NFT standard as ERC-7844 to address this problem. To better understand how this new protocol works, let’s first look at how the metadata can be transferred privately and how to verify this transfer in the ERC-7844 smart contract. The transfer() interface accepts a proof parameter which proves the following situation. Assuming the sender has the accessibility of the encrypted original metadata and its hash commitment. And one oracle can decrypt the original metadata secretly and create another secret key to encrypt the metadata again with it. Then the newly encrypted metadata and its hash can be published, and the secret key will be encrypted with the public key of the receiver and then sent to the sender. When the receiver sees this published encrypted metadata, it acknowledges its accessibility of this data with its signature. The oracle also gives proof of the encrypted metadata indeed coming from the original metadata. Then the sender, when invokes the transfer(), provides the proof which includes the oracle’s proof about the validity of the newly encrypted metadata and the receiver’s signature as the proof of its accessibility of that data to the agent NFT smart contract together with the encrypted secret key. The smart contract verifies the proof, completes the remaining operations of the NFT transfer, and publishes the encrypted secret key to the receiver. The receiver then can decrypt the secret key with its private key and then use the secret key to access the encrypted metadata. The oracle can be implemented with TEE in this protocol. Now we talk about how an agent can be used with this NFT. Assume we have an honest agent code (could be #ELIZA for example) running in some environment. When this agent is initiated by a user, it is given an NFT tokenId that it should run with. It then checks whether the user who initiates it is the owner of the NFT tokenId. If he is not, the agent stops continuing the service, otherwise, the agent will get the access method of the agent metadata recorded in the NFT smart contract and loads them into its local store and continue to serve the user. The metadata can be stored in a decentralized storage system like @0G_labs storage to provide permanent accessibility. The agent holds the secret key that can be used to decrypt the metadata. Finally, the honesty of the agent actions can be realized and guaranteed with TEE environment either. This would enable an agent marketplace to make agents tradable. Just like @opensea for traditional NFT. Unlike trading the #memecoin issued by agents in existing platforms, this agent marketplace first enables the trading of the true intelligence of the agents.