The people who built the rails of the machine economy are not, for the most part, the people whose names appear in agent-token threads. This page lists the ones who signed a specification or shipped the reference implementation, with the organisation they were at when they did the work.
Two things are deliberately absent. There are no follower counts, because a follower count is not evidence of authorship. And Agentic Finance Graph does not appear on any of these lists — we index this stack, we did not write it.
Identity and trust — ERC-8004
Posted to Ethereum Magicians on 13 August 2025 as Trustless Agents. Three registries: Identity (an ERC-721 with a URI), Reputation, and Validation. It requires EIPs 155, 712, 721 and 1271, and it was written as a trust layer on top of A2A rather than as a competitor to it.
| Person | Org | What they put their name on |
|---|---|---|
| Marco De Rossi | MetaMask (AI lead) | ERC-8004 author. His public framing: a catalog of agents on-chain — a catalog, not an app store. |
| Davide Crapis | Ethereum Foundation | ERC-8004 author, listed on the spec at an ethereum.org address. |
| Jordan Ellis | ERC-8004 author. The reason identity was designed as an extension of A2A trust rather than a parallel scheme. | |
| Erik Reppel | Coinbase Developer Platform | ERC-8004 author and the x402 launch. The single overlap between the passport and the payment. |
The registries live at deterministic CREATE2 addresses across EVM mainnets: identity at 0x8004A169FB4a3325136EB29fA0ceB6D2e539a432, reputation at 0x8004BAa17C55a88189AE136b182e5fdA19dE9b63. What those registries do, and what they do not prove →
Payments — x402
Published 6 May 2025 by Coinbase Developer Platform, moved toward neutrality with Cloudflare in September 2025, and operational under the Linux Foundation from 14 July 2026 with forty members.
| Person or body | Org | What |
|---|---|---|
| Erik Reppel | Coinbase | Engineering lead on CDP; the public voice of x402 and a co-author of its whitepaper. |
| Nemil Dalal | Coinbase | x402 launch byline, 6 May 2025. |
| Dan Kim | Coinbase | x402 launch byline, 6 May 2025. |
| — | Cloudflare | Wired 402 into its Agents SDK and MCP hosts, and co-started the foundation conversation in September 2025. |
| — | Linux Foundation | Steward of the x402 project from 2026 — and of A2A from 2025. Neither Google nor Coinbase owns the handshake or the 402. |
The full x402 story, from reserved status code to forty-member foundation →
Talk — A2A and MCP
| Person or body | Org | What |
|---|---|---|
| Rao Surapaneni | Google Cloud, Business Applications | Public owner of the Agent2Agent launch, 9 April 2025, with fifty-plus partners. |
| Mike Smith, Alan Blount, Kassandra Dhillon, Daryl Ducharme, April Kyle Nassi | Google open-source notes | Named contributors on the A2A anniversary post. |
| — | Anthropic | The Model Context Protocol, November 2024. Published at the organisation level; the protocol outgrew any one byline. |
How the two protocols differ, and why confusing them rots an architecture →
Marketplaces and stacks
| Person | Org | What |
|---|---|---|
| Jansen Teng | Virtuals Protocol | Co-founder and CEO. PathDAO in 2021 became Virtuals; the Agent Commerce Protocol is the job cycle on top. |
| Wee Kee Tiew | Virtuals Protocol | Co-founder. |
| Humayun Sheikh | Fetch.ai; chair of the ASI Alliance | Founder and CEO from 2017, and an early DeepMind investor. |
| Toby Simpson, Thomas Hain | Fetch.ai | Co-founders, Cambridge, 2017. |
| Ben Goertzel | SingularityNET | The AGI lineage inside the ASI Alliance story. Not part of the ERC-8004 story. |
| David Minarsch | Valory / Olas | Cambridge game theory, then head of multi-agent systems at Fetch, then the AEA framework and Olas. The cleanest academic-to-product line in the sector. |
| Shaw Walters | Eliza Labs | The Eliza framework and the ai16z saga. In 2026: building the software without a ticker. |
Wallets and policy
Wallet-vendor engineering leads rotate, and attaching the wrong name to a shipped product is a worse error than attaching none. So this layer is cited by product: MetaMask's delegation framework and its ERC-7710 scoped-spend work, Coinbase CDP session keys and in-place EOA upgrade, Alchemy's modular-account 7702 implementation and wallet_createSession, Safe's account abstraction, and AmbireAccount7702.
The exception is Marco De Rossi, who signed ERC-8004 while leading AI at MetaMask — which is why the same organisation appears in both the identity row and the wallet row. What 7702 actually changes about who holds the key →
Language, which is not a protocol
| Person | When | What |
|---|---|---|
| Andrew Ng | March 2024 | Popularised agentic as a spectrum rather than a yes-or-no, at Sequoia. |
| Michael Wooldridge, Nick Jennings and the AAMAS generation | 1990s–2000s | Multi-agent systems as an academic field, decades before a chain existed to settle on. |
| Tim Berners-Lee and the HTTP working group | 1990s | Reserved status code 402, and left it unused. |
How this list is maintained
- A person appears only if they are named on a public specification, a launch post, or an organisation's own contributor notes.
- Organisations are given as at the time of the work, not as of today.
- Token holders, treasury sizes and follower counts are not authorship and do not appear.
- Corrections are welcome and are made in place with the date changed — write to us.