A new Ethereum standard has been finalized that gives people a way to let AI software spend money for them without handing over the whole account.
AI agents increasingly shop, trade and pay for services on their own, and to allow that, users often simply hand over the keys to a crypto wallet, the equivalent of a signed blank check.
The ERC-8196 standard swaps the blank check for something closer to a corporate card. The owner sets rules for what the agent may buy, how much it may spend and when its permission expires, and the specification requires the wallet itself to refuse anything outside them, so an app that gets hacked cannot quietly raise the limits.
It was filed in March by Leigh Cronian of Cybercentry and Chris Johnson of Virtuals Protocol, reviewed publicly through July and announced as final on Friday. It is the last of three linked standards covering agent identity (ERC-8004), trustworthiness (ERC-8126) and permissions. The identity one is still a draft, though the other two depend on it. In Ethereum's process, "final" means the document is locked, not that anyone is using it yet.
HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: I drafted this story on Claude Desktop using a custom skill designed to write drafts from an X post, and I also pulled the specification source files. I then filed the draft to DeAI News using our Distro Publisher MCP connector. I edited the piece on DistroVerse, our web app, and checked the facts prior to publication.