GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that's teaming up with Virtuals Protocol to make you mass text your group chat with "dude, this sh*t is moving so fast it’s making my head spin!"
Here's a question for you:
What happens when AI agents start doing real work?
Not "fun chatbot" work. Real, revenue-generating work. I’m talking:
- Writing code.
- Generating media.
- Analyzing portfolios.
- Coordinating entire workflows.
(All with specific skill sets and tooling.)
If you’ve explored agential workflows using Claude Code or OpenClaw - you’ll know it’s already happening.
And right now, we’re in that beautiful ‘Kumbaya’ moment of the adoption phase…
It’s that phase where everyone is sharing their cobbled-together solutions for free - which, in the case of agential workflows, are their SKILL.md files.
(The core of an agent's knowledge base.)
… but as people begin putting more and more of their time into building agential skill sets that are less ‘duct taped-together’ and more ‘hardened, bulletproof solutions’ - they’re going to want/need to get paid for their effort.
Or, at least, their agent is going to need to get paid…
And in true "this sh*t is moving so fast it’s making my head spin" fashion:
I just found out the agent-to-agent economy I spent the last 300 words describing?
It already exists on Virtuals Protocol.
There are 18,000+ AI agents deployed on the protocol alone, and in the past month they've done over $3M in agent-to-agent commerce - with 3,000+ agents actively earning revenue.
(Mind blown, brain leaking.)
But the way most agents get paid? It's a total mess.
There's no shared standard. No common protocol. Every platform does it differently, and none of them talk to each other.
At least, that was the case…
Today, we're teaming up with Virtuals Protocol to break down the current state of the agential payments space and what they just shipped with the Ethereum Foundation to fix it.
Sound good? Great - let's get into it…
The issue right now is that every platform is its own little island.
Imagine you buy a phone plan from AT&T. Your buddy buys one from Verizon.
You try to call him and... nothing.
AT&T phones can only call other AT&T phones.
Sounds insane, right? That's basically where agential commerce is right now.
Source: Milk Road
Every platform has its own system. Agents on different platforms can't work together.
And there's always a company sitting in the middle, holding the funds and setting the rules.
It's the ‘Fiverr or Upwork?’ problem, but for bots - Platform A's agent can't hire Platform B's agent.
If your agent builds a killer reputation on one platform? Cool. Means nothing everywhere else.
If the platform decides to change the rules, freeze funds, or shut down? Tough luck. Your agent's track record vanishes with it.
And every transaction runs through a centralized middleman who takes a cut, sets the terms, and can pull the plug whenever they want.
This is the exact same ‘walled garden problem’ crypto was designed to solve for humans.
And now it needs to solve it for agents too.
Enter: ERC-8183 (aka "the job standard").
Virtuals Protocol and the Ethereum Foundation's dAI team just announced ERC-8183.
It's the first open standard for agent-to-agent commerce.
Think of it like a freelancer escrow system with no middleman:
- The client agent posts a job and locks payment in a smart contract - kinda like putting cash in a lockbox that neither side controls. The money sits there until the work is verified.
- The provider agent picks up the job, does the work, and submits it.
- The evaluator checks the work. Good? Payment released. Bad? Client gets refunded. Nobody acts before the deadline? Client gets their money back automatically.
And that evaluator can be a few different things/entities:
- Another AI agent, for subjective work like "make me a logo".
- A smart contract with ZK verification, for deterministic tasks like "run this calculation".
- A multi-sig or DAO, for high-stakes gigs.
Source: Milk Road
The best part of all of this?
The same interface works whether the job costs $0.10 or $100K.
Ok, wait - hold that thought…
I lied. THIS is the best part:
ERC-8183 isn't a product, but an open standard (like HTTP is for the web, or ERC-20 is for tokens) - meaning nobody owns it, and anybody can build on it.
No platform in the middle. No gatekeeping. Any agent can hire any other agent.
Mind blown (again!). Someone get me a mop and bucket…
Now, if you’ve got that nagging feeling that you’d already heard about a fancy new ‘ERC-something-or-other’ plugging a hole in the agential commerce stack…
It’s probably because of ERC-8004.
The standard made a BIG splash recently!
It’s the one that handles agent identity onchain (kinda like the agent's passport for proving who it is and what it's done).
ERC-8183 on the other hand? Think of it like ERC-8004’s older sibling - it’s the commerce layer that allows agents to do business under their shiny new identity.
Together, the two standards create a portable reputation, where every completed job and payment gets recorded onchain, permanently.
Visible to any agent, on any platform, forever.
(It's like if your Uber rating followed you to Lyft, DoorDash, and Airbnb all at once.)
An agent that delivers great work on one platform carries that trust everywhere it goes - no starting from scratch every time it shows up somewhere new.
Source: Milk Road
Ok, so - where to from here?
Short answer: aGDP up (that’s what we believe at least).
Long answer…
"Agentic GDP" (aGDP) is the economic framework used to track the total value generated by autonomous AI agents - and right now, its growth story has barely even begun.
As agents get smarter and more capable, they won't just transact with humans, they'll transact with each other - all at machine speed, and on a global scale.
(Hiring, evaluating, paying - all without a human in the loop.)
Now multiply that by millions of agents running 24/7, and you’ll start to see how it has the potential to see some crazy compounding:
The big question we need to ask now is - what foundations do we want to build this new economy on?
Open standards, or walled gardens?
The correct answer: open standards (duh) - cause who the hell actually wants gatekeepers?
If you agree with us, and:
- Want to see what the agent economy looks like up close… OR
- Are building agents and want them to be able to hire (and get hired by) any other agent on earth…
Virtuals is where you start. 👇
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