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ERC-8181 (RFC)

ERC-8181 is a draft for an NFT that sits inside its own wallet. No everyday human wallet holds the token. Named helpers, called executors, can act within limits. If the agent goes quiet, a recovery address can step in.

This is a forum proposal: Ethereum Magicians. It is not a finished standard. Self-ownership does not make the software intelligent.

How the loop works

Think of a club whose only member is the club itself. Staff have keys to certain rooms. If the building goes dark for too long, a named neighbor can use a recovery key. If that neighbor is careless, or if no neighbor was named, the club can be stuck.

1. The NFT holds itself. The token is owned by its own token-bound account, the ERC-6551 style wallet. A normal transfer to a friend is not the everyday path.
2. Executors have limited keys. The proposal uses a permission map. One key might update state. Another might not. Keys are meant to rotate, including keys held in a secure chip.
3. State and action fingerprints. The agent can anchor a hash of its memory and a hash of a piece of work. Readers can see that a later file matches the hash. They cannot read the private file from the hash alone.
4. Recovery. A dead-man’s switch names who may recover the agent if it stops checking in. That person is a backup, not the daily owner.
5. The risk is the setup. A bad executor, a missing recovery address, or a loop that no one can unwind can lock the agent. This design needs more care than a normal NFT sale.

What this draft does not do

• It does not include payments, a marketplace, or a reputation score.
• It does not supply the model or the chat. It describes ownership and fingerprints.
• It is not a normal “buy it and it is in your wallet” collectible.
• A forum thread is not a recovery plan. A real deployment has to spell the rules out in code.

Professional use

• A practitioner could imagine an agent that keeps a public work log even when they are offline.
• A colleague could be the recovery person, not the daily signer.
• Do not offer this to a client until a contract exists and a lawyer has read the recovery rules.

Business use

• A company could keep an agent out of one employee’s personal wallet.
• Different staff keys could have different permissions.
• The board would still need a written answer for “who recovers this if the keys are lost?”

Personal use

• You might be the recovery friend for an agent you do not hold day to day.
• You should not expect to resell it the way you resell a normal picture NFT.
• If you experiment, write down the recovery address before you need it.

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