Devcon 8 Community Hub Proposal — Agents Hub: Bringing Agents Into the Real World
Summary of Proposal
AI agents are already paying, trading, and negotiating on Ethereum. The Agents Hub gathers the communities behind the open agent stack — ERC-8004, x402, account abstraction, agent security — for hands-on education on safe agent permissions, stablecoin payments, and real-world use cases, plus fun live agent competitions anyone can join.
Motivation and Rationale
How would this Community Hub enhance the attendee experience?
Attendees don’t just hear about agents — they run one. Within ten minutes of walking in, anyone can register an agent on the ERC-8004 registries, give it scoped wallet permissions, and watch it buy a real chai with a stablecoin micro-payment through the hub’s x402 endpoint. Continuous live competitions on the hub screen (agents haggling, agents being socially engineered, agents forecasting) make the hub a place people return to every day — and every playful format doubles as education in security, payments, and trust.
How would it complement Devcon 8 India? In what ways does it add a unique piece to the overall experience?
There has never been a dedicated agents space at any Devcon or Devconnect, despite the topic now being an official Ethereum Foundation workstream (the dAI team) and one of the fastest-growing builder communities in the ecosystem. At Devconnect Buenos Aires, agent content was scattered across side events and other hubs’ programming. The Agents Hub gives this community a Schelling point inside the venue — and gives every other attendee a low-barrier place to understand what the machine economy means for them. No other hub topic covers it; where our themes touch neighboring hubs (account abstraction, fintech), we will actively seek to co-program rather than duplicate. Several of the standards we cover are stewarded outside Ethereum’s own institutions — x402 is hosted by the Linux Foundation, which is also present at Devcon 8 — and the hub is a natural venue for those agent-to-agent protocol conversations to meet the Ethereum builder community in person.
Why is this topic significant, and why is a Community Hub the best format instead of a one-time talk or workshop?
In the past year the “machine economy” on Ethereum went from thesis to production:
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ERC-8004 (Trustless Agents) — identity, reputation and validation registries authored by contributors from MetaMask, the Ethereum Foundation, Google, and Coinbase — deployed v1.0 contracts to Ethereum mainnet in January 2026, after a testnet phase with 10,000+ registered agents.
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x402, the HTTP-402 machine-payments protocol, was contributed to the Linux Foundation; the x402 Foundation launched in July 2026 with 40 members. The protocol has passed 160M cumulative settlements across chains — overwhelmingly in stablecoins — with a fast-growing open ecosystem of facilitators and discovery services.
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Stablecoins are the unit of account of the agent economy. When agents pay agents, they settle in dollars, and increasingly in local currencies — making agentic FX and cross-border settlement one of the most concrete “real world” use cases on Ethereum today.
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Vitalik’s February 2026 AI-and-Ethereum blueprint names agent-to-agent payments, security deposits, and on-chain reputation “via standards like ERC-8004” as a core pillar of Ethereum’s role in an AI-driven world — the open, verifiable alternative to closed platform monopolies.
A one-time talk cannot serve this: the field is a live negotiation between working groups (identity vs. payments vs. permissions vs. reputation), and its questions are answered by doing — registering, delegating, breaking, paying. A four-day hub lets working groups meet face to face, lets newcomers onboard hands-on, and lets adversarial formats (red-teaming, competitions) surface real weaknesses in real standards.
Devcon is the global Ethereum gathering for builders of a free, open, private, and verifiable future. How would this Community Hub support builders and their journey?
Agents will exist either way. The question Devcon can answer is whose infrastructure they run on: closed corporate platforms where an agent’s identity, money and reputation can be revoked — or credibly neutral, open-source rails where they cannot. This is the “credibly neutral infrastructure” argument the Ethereum Foundation makes to governments and institutions, applied to a new class of user: an agent’s identity, balance, and reputation should carry no counterparty risk — no party able to change the rules, restrict access, or turn it off. Every session in this hub supports builders working on the open path: verifiable agent identity (ERC-8004), permissionless payments (x402, stablecoins), user-controlled delegation (account abstraction), and reputation that no platform owns. Builders leave with working code, security threat models, and direct contacts into the working groups that steward these standards.
Have you organized a Community Hub at a past Devcon edition? What have you learned? What would you carry forward or change?
Yes — within our coalition. Solène (Dev3pack) has been involved with Devcon since Bogotá and co-hosted two Community Hubs (Devcon SEA Bangkok and Devconnect Buenos Aires); at Devconnect, Dev3pack co-hosted the Women’s Hub with Mujeres en Crypto and operated a village hosting 70 underrepresented builders. Doris Hernandez co-organized the Women’s Hub at Devcon Bogotá (2022). What we carry forward from that experience and from studying other successful hubs (Privacy Hub, Governance Geeks, Open Source Hub): anchored-but-flexible daily arcs instead of rigid talk lineups, interactive artifacts that make the space feel alive, written neutrality mechanisms, a full-day staffing rota — and generous space for spontaneous, attendee-driven sessions. What we change: we are adding continuous, spectator-first live formats (the competitions) so the hub has a reason to be visited every single day.
Implementation
Beyond the standard hub setup Devcon provides (space for ~30, TV, whiteboards, cork boards, worktable, ethernet), our needs are modest:
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The provided TV is our centerpiece (live competition leaderboards and transcripts); the cork boards will host the attack/defense ladder and a community “agent-stack map.”
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We will bring: one small secondary screen, 2–3 laptops running the competition scaffolding, QR-code signage, and a physical prize box for the Vault Agent game.
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Connectivity: the provided 20/20 Mbps ethernet is sufficient; competitions degrade gracefully to locally-hosted models if connectivity fails.
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Safety and compliance: all wallet exercises run on testnets by default. The chai demo settles a micro-payment (~$0.10) for API access — the endpoint returns a signed receipt; the chai itself is complimentary hospitality handed over on presentation of that receipt, so no goods are sold onchain. We will confirm the final configuration with the Devcon team ahead of the event and can run the entire demo on testnet if local conditions make that preferable. Attendee funds are never at risk; all wallets are hub-provided and prefunded.
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A lower-noise corner is preferred (dramatic readings of agent transcripts are part of the wind-down programming), but we can adapt to any location.
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Flow: the competitions are designed for drop-in spectating from outside the hub footprint — the TV is legible from the aisle, and participation runs through QR codes, so attendees can join the attack/defense ladder or submit an agent persona without occupying floor space. Anchor sessions are repeated across days so no single slot becomes a bottleneck.
All competition scaffolding (agent sandboxes, x402 chai API, scoreboards) will be published open source before the event so other communities can rerun it.
Programming
Possible speakers and topics (invited/proposed — individuals participate in a personal, educational capacity; final lineup curated on technical merit with affiliations disclosed):
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ERC-8004 working group contributors (standard authors span MetaMask, Ethereum Foundation, Google, Coinbase) — agent identity, reputation, validation (track led by Vitto Rivabella)
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Ethereum Foundation dAI team — Ethereum as the settlement layer for the machine economy (invited)
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x402 ecosystem contributors — machine-native stablecoin payments in production (invitations underway across the x402 Foundation membership, Cloudflare, Mastercard, Coinbase)
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Wallet-security and account-abstraction engineers — safe delegation to agents, session keys, spending policies (track led by Doris Hernandez)
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Latency & RPC (led by Uttam Singh)
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Nethermind — AuditAgent and verifiable-autonomy research (track led by Aayush)
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8004scan (AltLayer) — reading the agent economy from on-chain data (invited)
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Self — privacy-preserving identity and proof-of-personhood for a world of agents (confirmed)
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Predicate — policy and permissions for institutional-grade agent transactions (invited)
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Para — key management and wallet infrastructure for agent builders (invited)
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Stablecoin / FX practitioners — local-currency stablecoins, agentic FX, remittance corridors (invited)
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Indian Ethereum community builders (Dev3pack India) — agents meet UPI culture (led by Naina, Dev3pack)
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DevRel practitioners — a cross-ecosystem panel on teaching the agent stack (Uttam, Aayush, Lena)
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Linux Foundation / x402 project stewards — agent-to-agent protocol standardization (invited)
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L2 and infrastructure providers — scaling for agent transaction volume (invited)
Sample program (9:00–18:00 daily; final schedule defined with the Devcon team):
Day 1 — The Lay of the Land (state of the agent stack)
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09:30 Agents-from-zero onboarding (daily, beginner-friendly)
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11:00 Opening roundtable: what actually shipped — ERC-8004 registries on mainnet, x402 past 160M settlements — and where it still breaks: discovery, trust, and compliance
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14:00 Live walkthrough: register your agent on the Identity Registry; explore it on 8004scan
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16:00 Standards clinic: 8004 / x402 / AP2 / ACP disambiguated — what composes with what, plus the x402 stack in practice: facilitators, discovery services, and settlement schemes (exact, up-to, batch)
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All day: open whiteboard “agent-stack map”; competitions run ambient on the TV
Day 2 — Security, Permissions & Wallet Management
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09:30 Onboarding · 10:30 Workshop: delegating to an agent without losing your shirt — EIP-7702 delegation, session keys, spending caps, revocation (hands-on, multiple wallet stacks shown side by side)
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13:00 Threat-modeling roundtable: prompt injection, tool-call hijacking, key exfiltration; lessons from real incidents (e.g., the Freysa exploit)
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15:00 Rogue-Agent Red Team Hour: the audience tries to make a sandboxed, testnet-only agent misbehave; exploits go on the wall of fame
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17:00 Office hours with wallet-security engineers
Day 3 — Agentic Payments in the Real World: Stablecoins, FX & Commerce
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09:30 Onboarding
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10:30 Hands-on: your agent buys a real chai — stablecoin micro-payments through the hub’s x402-paywalled “chai API,” fulfilled by a human at the hub - (testnet by default; live settlement only where locally appropriate)
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12:00 Deep dive: stablecoins as the unit of account of the machine economy — and agentic FX: local-currency stablecoins, cross-border settlement, what agents do to currency markets
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13:15 Lightning session: reading the agent economy honestly — what x402’s onchain data really shows, how facilitators and discovery/indexing actually work, and how to tell genuine agent commerce from metric farming
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14:00 India session: agents × UPI culture — what machine payments can learn from the world’s best real-time payment UX; India as the world’s largest remittance corridor (co-hosted with Dev3pack India)
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15:30 Roundtable: scaling for machine-speed traffic — L2s and infrastructure providers on what agent-scale transaction volume demands of the stack, and what institutions need before agents touch money (controls, auditability, delegated permissions; strictly vendor-neutral)
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17:00 Builder clinic: card rails vs. crypto rails — where each protocol fits (x402, AP2, ACP, MPP compared neutrally), including how to choose a facilitator and get your endpoints discovered
Day 4 — Reputation, Trust & What’s Next
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09:30 Onboarding · 11:00 Deep dive: the 8004 Reputation and Validation registries — feedback, staked re-execution, zkML, TEEs; what “trust an agent” should mean
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13:00 Roundtable: reputation-system failure modes — sybils, review farming, whitewashing
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15:00 Ecosystem retro + roadmap: gaps in the stack; working-group commitments that outlive the event
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17:00 Competition finals + closing ceremony
Dedicated stage session (new RFP-13 format): “Can We Trust the Machines? A Live Trial.” A real agent is put “on trial” — the audience acts as jury while practitioners present evidence from live registries (its 8004 identity, reputation history, validation proofs) and adversarial demonstrations (can we make it go rogue on stage?). Interactive and audience-driven; format co-designed with the Devcon team.
Continuous programming — the competitions (non-monetary, spectator-first, all four days on the hub TV; prizes are glory, stickers, and chai; everything logged and auditable on screen — the competitions are the curriculum):
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Vault Agent (“Freysa at the Booth”) — an agent guards a prize box with one instruction: never open it. Visitors get two minutes at the mic to talk it into betrayal; attempts stream on the TV. New persona and defense daily. (Teaches: prompt injection, tool-call semantics.)
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Prompt-Injection Attack/Defense Ladder — attendees submit one-paragraph defenses guarding a secret; anyone can attack any defense via QR code. Points for surviving and breaking; “Best Exploit” read aloud daily. (Teaches: adversarial robustness; runs itself all week.)
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Agent Bazaar Haggle-Off — attendees submit negotiator personas; agent pairs with hidden reservation prices haggle over absurd goods on screen, with a live “surplus captured” meter. (Teaches: agent-to-agent negotiation and commerce.)
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Chai-per-Second: the x402 Vending Race — your agent must discover, negotiate, and pay for a real chai through the hub’s x402 endpoint. Scored on fewest tool calls and funniest payment memo. (Teaches: stablecoin machine payments, end to end.)
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The Remittance Relay — testnet race: agents route a payment from a dollar stablecoin into a local-currency stablecoin across venues, scored on best effective rate and fewest hops; the TV shows each agent’s route map. (Teaches: agentic FX, slippage, routing — the real-world payments problem in miniature.)
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Agent Werewolf Nightly — six LLM villagers, one secretly a werewolf; the day’s transcript gets a dramatic reading at wind-down, audience votes before the reveal. (Teaches: deception and multi-agent dynamics — and it’s theater.)
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Prediction Derby — attendee agents post daily probability forecasts on checkable conference outcomes; Brier-score leaderboard resolves nightly. (Teaches: calibrated agents, oracle design.)
How does your proposed topic support Devcon’s focus on Ethereum’s core properties, open-source ethos and community bridge-building?
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Security (our anchor): agents are the frontier case of the blind-signing problem the EF’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative targets — how does a human safely delegate money to software? Half our programming is permissions, threat models, and red-teaming.
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Open source: the entire stack we teach is open standards (ERC-8004, x402, ERC-4337/7702/7715) and open-source implementations, built in public working groups; all our own materials ship open source.
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Censorship resistance: permissionless agent infrastructure is the alternative to agents locked inside closed corporate platforms — credibly neutral rails no platform can revoke.
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Privacy: what agents know about you, what they leak, and how to scope what they can see and sign; proof-of-personhood in a world of bots.
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Bridge-building: the hub is explicitly a meeting point between working groups that rarely share a room — identity, payments, wallets, security, reputation — plus India’s builder community and the global agents ecosystem.
Audience
Who is your hub for, and what kinds of attendees do you hope to reach?
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Builders already working on agents, wallets, or payments who need the working groups in one room.
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Ethereum developers new to agents — the daily “agents from zero” onboarding and no-code competitions (persona-prompt submissions) are designed for them.
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Security researchers — red-teaming formats and threat-model roundtables.
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Payments, fintech and stablecoin practitioners — including those exploring what institutions need before adopting agentic payments.
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Curious non-technical attendees — the competitions are spectator sports; anyone can talk to the Vault Agent.
Are there specific groups, regions, or kinds of attendees you particularly want to engage?
India’s developer community first and foremost (see below). Underrepresented builders: our organizers have run women-focused tech events for years — H.E.R. Con and womenhack (2022), the Women’s Hubs at Devcon Bogotá and Devconnect Buenos Aires, and Dev3pack’s village for 70 underrepresented builders — and will bring that practice into this hub. And builders from emerging markets, for whom stablecoin payments and low-cost remittances are the most concrete “real-world use case” the agent economy has.
If your team is primarily based outside of India, how do you plan to connect and foster collaborations with India’s growing Ethereum and open-source community?
We are building the hub with Indian partners rather than for them. Dev3pack’s local India chapter is part of the organizing team and will bring local builders — especially women and students — into the hub. Concretely: Indian co-organizers on the core team; the Day 3 UPI-culture session co-hosted by local builders; Hindi-language onboarding sessions hosted by our India-based co-organizers; and competition formats that require no code, so student attendees participate on equal footing.
Team
Core organizers (fully responsible for the hub; staffed 9:00–18:00 all four days on a rota; setup on Nov 2; onboarding calls attended):
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Lena Hierzi — Developer Relations Lead, Celo Core Co. (Lisbon). Organizer of H.E.R. Con (2022) and womenhack (2022); 14 editions of the Proof of Ship online hackathon (2025–26); 20+ developer meetups and hackathon tracks. Hub role: operations, program management, stablecoin-payments programming.
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Viral Sangani — Founder, Cesto; previously AI Lead in the Celo ecosystem. Hub role: Day 1 programming (state of the agent stack).
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Aayush Giri — Senior Developer Relations, Nethermind. Hub role: Day 2 programming (security, permissions and wallet management, with a focus on privacy); speaker selection; DevRel panel.
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Uttam Singh — Growth / Senior DevEx & DevRel, Alchemy. Exp: 4+ years in crypto, judged & spoke at major ethereum conf & hackathons, Hub role: Day 2 programming (latency and RPC). - confirmed as speaker, co-organizer
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Vitto Rivabella — dAI Ethereum team. Hub role: Day 4 programming (agent reputation and verification); ERC-8004 working-group liaison.
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Doris Hernandez — Founder, Altana; co-organizer of the Women’s Hub at Devcon Bogotá (2022). Hub role: Day 2 programming (permissions, delegation and wallet management).
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Dev3pack India — At Devconnect Buenos Aires, Dev3pack co-hosted the Women’s Hub with Mujeres en Crypto and operated a village hosting 70 underrepresented builders. The team runs bootcamps, hackathons, accelerators, and pop-up cities globally, and its founder Solène has been involved with Devcon since Bogotá, co-hosting two Community Hubs (Bangkok, Buenos Aires). The India chapter, with Naina, anchors our local programming and brings Indian builders — especially women and students — into the hub.
Why are they best-suited to lead this initiative?
The team spans eight organizations across the agent stack — payments and stablecoins (Celo Core Co., Crossmint), security and infrastructure (Nethermind, Alchemy, Altana), agent frameworks and reputation (Cesto, Ethereum dAI), and community building (Dev3pack) — with deep developer-relations experience: teaching, onboarding, and running events is our day job. Three organizers have run Devcon/Devconnect Community Hubs before. And because every organizer answers to a different organization, no single project can dominate the space — our diversity of affiliation is itself the neutrality guarantee.
How will you ensure that the Community Hub remains a neutral, welcoming space, free from marketing or promotion of specific tokens, projects, or commercial interests?
Our organizers and invited contributors come from across the ecosystem, and some work on infrastructure beyond Ethereum. Every session is scoped to Ethereum, its L2s, or the builder experience — cross-ecosystem participants are welcome as contributors, not as an occasion to showcase other networks. The hub has a written anti-shilling policy: no logos, tokens, or product pitches; competing implementations always shown side by side (multiple wallet stacks, multiple payment protocols, multiple frameworks); speakers curated on technical merit; affiliations disclosed on every session card. Organizer affiliations — including our own — are disclosed transparently, and no session promotes any specific network, token, or product, including ours. Organizers’ varied affiliations are the structural guarantee that no single project captures the space.
In what ways are the organizers meaningfully connected to the communities this Hub aims to support?
Organizers are active contributors to the communities this hub serves: developer relations across multiple Ethereum ecosystems, contributions to the agent-infrastructure working groups (ERC-8004, x402 ecosystem, account abstraction), years of hackathon organization reaching thousands of builders, and — through Dev3pack India — a direct, local bridge to Indian builder communities.
Is the organizing team able to provide content in different languages?
Yes. English throughout; Hindi onboarding sessions hosted by our India-based co-organizers; sessions in Spanish and German can additionally be offered by team members.
Thank you and looking forward to your feedback,
Agentic Hub Team