Agent Trust Score

ERC-8004 gave AI agents a shared on-chain identity, and that is a real step forward. It is not a trust verdict. This guide walks through all three ERC-8004 registries – identity, reputation and validation – in plain language, then maps the trust signals that surround them. Registration is open and unvetted: the standard itself states it cannot cryptographically guarantee that an agent’s advertised capabilities are functional and non-malicious. At launch, 51.8% of 274,792 indexed agents sat in the Elevated Risk or Untrusted tier, and 21.1% carried the farm flag – patterns no single-agent identity check can detect. Five independent signals fill the gap the registry leaves: the owner wallet’s fraud probability, the feeder address funding chain, the creator’s rug pull and honeypot history, fleet-level farm detection across sibling agents, and EIP-7702 delegation status. ChainAware’s Agent Trust Score combines these into a 0 to 1,000 number with five tiers and named flags. By Week 41 of 2026, the index held 568,590 agents and the median trust of new registrations had fallen to a record low of 101. Free tier covers 1,000 queries per month with no signup across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Base and Avalanche C-Chain.

Agent identity and Know Your Agent (KYA) are not the same thing. Identity proves who stands behind an AI agent – its owner, credentials, and registration record. KYA is the wider process that decides whether the agent may act, and how far. This guide draws a clear line between the two, using public ERC-8004 registry data and ChainAware’s Agent Trust Score research to show where identity stops working. At launch, 51.8% of 274,792 indexed ERC-8004 agents sat in the Elevated Risk or Untrusted tier, and 21.1% carried the farm flag – patterns that a purely identity-based check cannot detect. A complete KYA process combines five inputs: identity, authorization, integrity, behavior, and status. Behavioral evidence covers the owner wallet’s fraud probability, the feeder address funding chain, fleet-level farm detection across sibling agents, and the creator’s rug pull and honeypot history. ChainAware’s Agent Trust Score supplies the behavioral layer for on-chain agents with a 0 to 1,000 score, five tiers from Untrusted to Sovereign, and named flags. Free tier covers 1,000 queries per month with no signup. Coverage includes Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Base, and Avalanche C-Chain.

Know Your Agent (KYA) is the process of deciding whether an AI agent may act and how far it may go. It combines three questions: who is this agent, what did the user allow it to do, and how likely is the operator to cause a loss? Identity frameworks and payment protocols answer the first two. Only behavioral evidence answers the third – and behavioral evidence is what decides most losses. This pillar guide explains the full KYA framework, compares it with KYC, defines the four evidence groups (owner wallet fraud probability, feeder funding chain, creator rug pull and honeypot history, fleet-level farm detection), and maps ChainAware’s Agent Trust Score 0 to 1,000 five-tier system to practical access decisions. It also documents what public data reveals: 51.8% of 274,792 indexed ERC-8004 agents sat in the Elevated Risk or Untrusted tiers at launch, 21.1% carried the farm flag, 741 were funded by confirmed rug pull operators, and the Week 41 median trust of new registrations fell to a record-low 101 across 568,590 indexed agents. The guide also serves as the index for the full KYA series covering identity vs KYA, ERC-8004 trust signals, funding-chain risk, agent fraud patterns, agentic commerce fraud and the four-party card model, and checkout verification. Free tier covers 1,000 queries per month with no signup.