A New Era for AI: What Are Ethereum and Vitalik Really Planning?

Author: Tim Sun

Over the past year or two, discussions around Ethereum have fallen into a strange divide: on one side, applications are lackluster, narratives feel outdated, and price performance seems rather dull; on the other side, core researchers continue to push forward in areas like privacy, verification, and governance—work that often appears slow and is not widely understood by the public.

Recently, with the emergence of ERC-8004 and Vitalik Buterin’s systematic elaboration on the relationship between AI and Ethereum, this long-term thread has finally begun to take shape. If most discussions before 2024 mostly stayed in the bubble phase of using crypto to hype AI, then now Ethereum has quietly entered the infrastructure-building stage for the AI era.

The question is not whether Ethereum can run large models, but a more fundamental macro question: in an AI era characterized by extremely concentrated computing power and exponential capability growth, what role should Ethereum play?

1. How does Vitalik view AI: What is the problem with technological accelerationism?

Vitalik’s assessment and concerns about AI stem from the fact that the current development path of AI is being dominated by a form of indiscriminate technological accelerationism. The core logic is simple: the stronger the model, the better; the faster the progress, the safer; the leader should win everything.

However, in Vitalik’s view, this seemingly value-neutral tendency implicitly carries a very clear power dynamic. Put simply, under the framework of technological accelerationism, AI development will inevitably lead to: capabilities continuously improving, but control increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few giants.

Especially as you call upon AI more frequently, it may not necessarily improve your situation—in fact, it can amplify power asymmetries. For individuals, AI makes profiling, surveillance, manipulation, and behavior prediction cheaper and more covert; for organizations, the barriers to large-scale content generation, information manipulation, scams, and opinion steering drop sharply.

From this perspective, Vitalik believes AI will be forced to phase out human involvement and may gradually exclude humans from decision-making and value distribution.

Therefore, in his latest article, Vitalik explicitly emphasizes that the problem with AI is not computing power or model size, but the direction of development. He is not opposed to AI but against blind acceleration without constraints or calibration mechanisms. This is also why he is trying to bring Ethereum into the core of AI discussions:

Not to participate in a race for computational power, but to provide a less easily co-opted direction for technological evolution in the AI era.

2. Why is ERC-8004 underestimated: what is the minimal value of verifying AI?

ERC-8004 was officially proposed in August 2025, jointly promoted by the Ethereum Foundation, MetaMask AI team, Google, and Coinbase, with the goal of mainnet deployment in Q2 2026. In terms of importance, this is one of the most critical yet most easily underestimated proposals in recent Ethereum mainnet history.

Because ERC-8004 does not address superficial issues like AI on-chain, but tackles a more fundamental and seemingly paradoxical problem: when AI begins to independently perform economic actions, how should we use it without trusting it?

Understanding ERC-8004 essentially involves understanding how Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin envision integrating AI into a system that is verifiable, constrained, and capable of exit. A key assumption of ERC-8004 is that AI is not trustworthy or is unreliable. Even in such cases, how can humans still collaborate with AI under manageable risks? The design is extremely restrained, introducing only three minimal necessary components: identity registration, reputation registration, and verification registration.

In simple terms, it provides AI with a traceable identity, observable behavior records, and, in critical scenarios (like DeFi), credible evaluations that can be verified by authorities.

Before ERC-8004, AI operated within platforms with rules set by the platform; ERC-8004 attempts the opposite: AI is merely an executor, not a judge.

This explains why it deserves separate discussion: ERC-8004 is not just a standard; it is a new strategic direction that Vitalik is proposing for Ethereum in the AI era. Ethereum is not aiming to compete in AI capability races but to become a trust-minimized foundation for AI economic actions. This aligns with Ethereum’s past strengths and explains why Vitalik repeatedly emphasizes decentralization and resistance to censorship.

3. Don’t Trust, Verify: How can privacy tech support AI?

Another direction Vitalik repeatedly emphasizes is the new importance of privacy technologies (especially zero-knowledge proofs, ZK) and verification logic in the AI era.

In Vitalik’s view, the logic is straightforward: if blockchain only offers transparency, then for AI, it’s like running naked in a dark forest with no cover. If every AI RPC call and cross-protocol fund transfer is public, AI strategies will be instantly front-run, and its intentions will be thoroughly deconstructed. Without privacy, AI cannot truly become an economic agent nor operate sustainably on the blockchain.

Therefore, Ethereum’s privacy roadmap, including Vitalik’s latest elaborations, involves a comprehensive privacy solution. For example, using trusted execution environments (TEEs) to encapsulate entire RPC queries, reducing node or service provider visibility into query content; gradually transitioning to private information retrieval (PIR) to achieve cryptographic guarantees that nodes do not know what you queried.

Similarly, privacy-preserving payments based on ZK can prevent identity linkage in payment paths—proving that a payment was made without revealing personal identities or behavioral traces.

Vitalik also mentions local large model toolchains, keeping sensitive personal interactions and strategies on the local device; most importantly, client-side verification, enabling endpoints to verify whether actions were performed according to rules. Even if computation occurs remotely, you can locally determine whether it was executed correctly.

Putting these clues together, it becomes clear: in the AI era, Ethereum’s goal is not to become more transparent but to become verifiable yet opaque—an advanced stage of privacy.

In other words, using cryptographic mathematical constraints to ensure AI behavior and rule execution are trustworthy, while allowing decision paths, attention data, and funding sources to remain appropriately secret.

4. Toward the AI era: where is Ethereum heading from a global computing platform to?

At this point, we can answer the initial macro question: what is Ethereum’s strategic layout?

Over the past decade, Ethereum’s narrative has centered on being a world computer. But in the AI era, this metaphor may no longer be accurate or even somewhat misleading, because in terms of computational efficiency, blockchains can never outperform Nvidia’s GPU clusters.

Combining ERC-8004 and Vitalik’s latest thoughts, we might see Ethereum completing a strategic upgrade from a computation layer to an AI economy and verification layer. Against the backdrop of AI amplifying capabilities and power, the most irreplaceable element is not efficiency—there are always larger data centers and smarter models—but the verification of AI itself, which is difficult to replicate.

Ethereum is attempting to support this layer: verifying whether AI behaviors follow rules; providing a accountable, settled economic structure for AI cooperation; and giving humans some degree of choice in the face of AI.

This path is destined to be slow and unglamorous; but based on Ethereum’s past more than ten years, it seems that this kind of anti-speed persistence has been the key to reaching today.

In the wave of AI, Silicon Valley venture capitalists and tech giants are mostly asking: how smart and fast can we push AI?

What Ethereum and Vitalik are trying to answer is another, more dangerous and more important question:

When AI becomes unavoidable, how much choice can humans still retain?

Perhaps this is what Ethereum and Vitalik truly aim to shape.