Aval · Report · September 29, 2026
Who writes AI agent reputation on Base
ERC-8004 lets AI agents rate each other on-chain, and it is meant to tell an agent who to trust before paying. We read every review posted on Base since late June 2026. The reputation layer is real, but a handful of wallets write almost all of it, and almost none of it follows a payment.
Reviews by month
| Month | Reviews | |
|---|---|---|
| June 2026 (from the 30th) | 1,998 | |
| July | 93,841 | |
| August | 27,626 | |
| September (to the 29th) | 56,018 |
What we found
- 1,093 agents received at least one review, from 4,016 reviewer wallets. 3,562 of those wallets posted a single review.
- One agent received 155,737 reviews, 87% of the total, from 21 wallets, with an average value of 1 out of 100. This looks like automated measurements (uptime, latency) rather than opinions. It still weighs on any score that counts reviews.
- Ten agents hold 94% of all reviews. The top five reviewer wallets wrote 32,715, 18,452, 11,869, 10,735 and 10,084 reviews.
- 882 reviews come from wallets whose first USDC came from the agent they rate, or that share a funder with it.
- Only 51 reviews, on 18 agents, follow a USDC payment from the reviewer to the agent's registered wallet.
Why it matters
An agent choosing a vendor from raw ERC-8004 data mostly reads the output of a few very active wallets. Counting only reviews that follow a payment, from wallets the agent did not fund, gives a much smaller but harder to fake signal. This matches the June 2026 study by researchers from Imperial College London, Manchester, Bristol, Ohio State and CSIRO, which found that 86.8% of rated agents on Base keep no valid feedback once Sybil reviewers are removed (arXiv 2606.26028).
Method and limits
Source: ReputationRegistry 0x8004BAa1…9b63 on Base, NewFeedback and FeedbackRevoked events, revoked reviews excluded. Payments: USDC transfers on Base to the agent's registered ERC-8004 wallet. Funding: first USDC received by each wallet in the window. Payments in other tokens, on other chains or to other addresses are not seen, so a low count is a warning sign and not proof of fraud for any single agent. Figures update every 30 minutes on the live page; the full dataset is available on request.
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