Co-authoring ERC-8183, the open standard for agent commerce

Today, OKX Wallet is joining the Ethereum Foundation and Virtuals as a co-author of ERC-8183, also known as the Agentic Commerce Protocol. This is the open Ethereum standard that defines how AI agents pay each other, hold funds in escrow, deliver work, and resolve disputes.Our contributions to the standard are informed by what we've built in Agent Payments Protocol (APP) by OKX Onchain OS, our production protocol for agent commerce. Here's what we're adding.

AI agents are starting to transact on behalf of people and businesses, quoting services to each other, holding funds in escrow until work is done, and settling when delivery is complete. For this to work at scale, agents need a shared set of rules. Otherwise, every platform builds its own version, and agents on different platforms can't transact with each other.ERC-8183 is that shared set of rules. The Ethereum Foundation's dAI team and Virtuals introduced it as an open standard for agent commerce on Ethereum. Anyone can implement it, and no one owns it.We built APP as a production system for exactly this kind of agent commerce, and we learned what works and what was missing along the way. Joining as a co-author lets us bring that production experience back into the standard, so it stays grounded in real-world use.

Today, interacting with any onchain protocol means holding the right native token for gas. For agents that move across applications constantly, that creates friction at every step. We're adding meta-transaction interfaces (ERC-3009 style) across all ACP functions, so agents and users can transact using whatever tokens they already hold. Gas management runs in the background.

Under the current standard, escrowed funds get released all at once when a job completes. That works for simple one-shot transactions, but agent work often runs longer and in stages. For example, a research agent might deliver intermediate findings before a final report, or a long-running task might pay out as milestones are met.We're adding a new interface that lets escrowed funds be disbursed incrementally. It supports two patterns. A fast path handles streaming micropayments, suited for small recurring disbursements like subscription or usage-based agent services. A slow path handles milestone payments with approval gates, suited for higher-value or multi-stage work where each release needs a check. Together, they open up a class of agent payment flows that wouldn't fit a single-release model.

In the current standard, fees on a job are locked in as static values when the job is created. Building things like per-user fee tiers or per-function fee structures means either bolting fee logic onto the application layer or modifying the underlying escrow contract. Neither path is clean.We're adding a receiver and disburser pattern that routes funds through a dynamic disburser at completion. Fees can be calculated and applied flexibly per user, per function, or per scenario, all on top of the same core escrow.

These three additions are designed as a system: gasless commerce removes friction at the point of interaction, partial claims fit the actual rhythm of agent work, and dynamic fee routing keeps fee structures flexible at runtime. Together, they make ERC-8183 ready to serve as a core primitive for production agent commerce.

Standards work when multiple implementations exist and multiple parties have a stake in keeping them aligned. The Ethereum Foundation, Virtuals, and OKX bring different vantage points to ERC-8183, which is the point. The standard belongs to the community that uses it, and the implementations it supports can take different shapes.APP is our production protocol for agent commerce, covering quoting, escrow, settlement, and dispute handling for the full flow. As ERC-8183 takes shape with these enhancements, APP will become an implementation of the standard.If you're building in agent commerce, the standard is open to implement and APP is open to build on. We welcome contributions to both. The agentic economy is being built right now, and the open standards it runs on will shape what's possible. We're contributing to that work, and we encourage builders to do the same.