Autonomous and semi-autonomous AI systems — planning, tool use, multi-agent coordination.
Inference markets charge a flat price per query. A cascade arbitrageur routes easy tasks to a cheap model and escalates only failures — capturing the spread. Olmedo, Schölkopf & Hardt (2026) show 40% net margins with no model-dev risk.
HTTP 402 sat reserved for 30 years. x402 fills it: an AI agent signs an EIP-3009 authorization into a header, a facilitator settles on Base in two seconds, no ETH required. Protocol mechanics, production numbers, and where the centralization risk lives.
EIP-7702, live in Pectra, lets an EOA borrow smart contract code for one transaction — no migration, no bundler. For AI agents: atomic batching closes the approve-to-swap MEV window, and session key delegation bounds the blast radius of a compromised agent without touching the master key.
AP2 mandates are signed after the LLM picks the target. Injected text can redirect payment to a malicious merchant before the signature is computed — and 3.8 ms of zero-trust nonce verification closes a different gap entirely.
Skill marketplaces let any agent buy trading capabilities off a shelf — and every skill is an execution vector. SAE's non-bypassable execution guards cut max drawdown from 46.4% to 3.2% (↓93%), CVaR by 97.5%, and the Delegation Gap by 97% on live perp data. The defense isn't in the model.
38.6% of Ethereum blocks today go through censoring relays. FOCIL (EIP-7805) ends builder exclusion with a 16-validator committee and a 1-out-of-16 honesty assumption hardwired into the fork-choice rule — landing in the Hegota upgrade, late 2026.
AI agents need real-world data. zkTLS closes the oracle gap: TLSNotary's MPC-TLS costs 30 MB of garbled circuits at 5 Mbps; its April 2026 Proxy mode cuts that to 4 seconds. Here is the trust model, the benchmarks, and what agents can prove today.
ERC-4337 lets AI agents transact without holding ETH — but the alt-mempool has its own fee market, bundler economics, and MEV surface every builder must understand.
Foundry forks freeze five properties of the Ethereum execution environment that are live, adversarial, and expensive in production: basefee, oracle prices, blockhash entropy, MEV competition, and TWAP accumulation. Each one silently misleads AI agents through testing.
An on-chain agent's transactions prove what happened, not why. Three 2026 papers on trajectory anomaly detection show how to close that gap — and how the optimistic bisection game from rollups makes it slashable.
An AI agent holding a raw ECDSA key is one model compromise from total loss. FROST's two-round DKG means the full private key never exists anywhere — not during setup, not during signing. Here's the mechanism, the Ethereum gap, and how Lit Protocol PKPs deploy it today.
Solana agents get 400 ms — but only if they declare every account they'll touch before execution starts. The Sealevel write-lock model, hot-account contention, Jito tip economics, and what the declarative execution contract means for AI agent design.