As artificial intelligence reshapes everything from finance to cybersecurity, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is strategizing how the world’s second-largest blockchain can fit into the future.
Rather than trying to merge blockchain and AI at a raw computational level (which Ethereum was never designed to handle), EF sees the network playing a different role: acting as a coordination and verification layer in an increasingly AI-mediated world.
Davide Crapis, head of artificial intelligence at EF, believes that the motivation is both philosophical and technical. More and more digital activities are being handled by artificial intelligence systems, whether answering questions, executing transactions, screening applications or writing software. If these systems are controlled by centralized entities, the values that underpin much of the cryptocurrency movement—decentralization, self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, and privacy—could be eroded.
“If AI doesn’t have the properties that we care about — self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, privacy — and then we use AI for everything, basically no one will have those properties,” he told CoinDesk in an interview at NEARCON 2026.
In this sense, Ethereum’s AI push is not about competing with OpenAI or Google on model size, but rather about ensuring that when AI becomes the interface to the internet, it doesn’t quietly re-concentrate power.
EF’s strategy is mainly based on two aspects. The first is what Crapis calls decentralized AI orchestration. As autonomous AI agents (software programs capable of performing tasks on their own) become more common, they will need ways to identify themselves, establish trust, and exchange payments. He believes that Ethereum is well-suited to provide this infrastructure.
“Ethereum serves as a public, governance-free verification layer for artificial intelligence,” he said.
In practice, this means that the heavy computational work of AI still happens off-chain, on traditional servers. But Ethereum can help agents discover each other through public registries, assess reputation through transparent history, route payments, and verify anchored cryptographic proofs of results. Crapis likens it to a decentralized version of Google reviews combined with a payment channel.
EF has been involved in developing standards to formalize this ecosystem, including the Proxy Identity and Trust Protocol, known as ERC-8004. According to Crapis, these standards are gaining traction outside of Ethereum, suggesting that the coordination layer for AI agents may be blockchain-based, even if the AI itself is not blockchain-based.
The second focus area focuses on bringing Ethereum’s core principles—such as privacy, openness, censorship, and security—to the world of artificial intelligence. Crapis internally calls this work “Props AI,” shorthand for the values that the Ethereum ecosystem has historically prioritized.
Privacy is a major part of that conversation. Interacting with centralized AI services can gradually generate detailed user profiles based on queries, usage patterns and behaviors.
From an Ethereum perspective, the challenge is to design AI systems that give users more control over their data and identities. One approach is to encourage more AI processing to be done locally on the user’s device whenever possible, thus reducing the amount of information that needs to be sent to a centralized server.
The broader goal is to ensure that as AI becomes integrated into everyday digital interactions, individuals still retain meaningful control over their data and how it is used, rather than ceding this power entirely to large platforms.
“We want to create a world where users retain as much data and power as possible,” Krapis said. “We just don’t make it available to operators.”
Security concerns are also fundamental to the strategy. As AI systems become more capable, they may automate and scale cyberattacks in ways that stress existing defenses. Crapis predicts that in the near future, AI systems will be able to mimic humans so convincingly that they disrupt traditional authentication methods.
“We may see AI-orchestrated hacks,” he said. “When AI can impersonate a human, the old security model is broken.”
In this environment, encryption keys may become even more important. Control of private keys is mathematically verifiable and does not rely on human judgment. Crapis describes Ethereum’s long-term role in stark terms.
“In a world where AI is rampant, we want Ethereum to be the place with the big locks,” he said. “If I have the key, I still have the power.”
Crapis described EF’s ongoing AI initiatives as one of several main priorities, rather than the dominant priority. Still, the move reflects a growing recognition within the crypto industry that artificial intelligence will shape the next phase of the internet. If the future is mediated by intelligent agents rather than human clicks, then the question becomes who controls the trajectory of those agents.
Ethereum’s bet is that even if it can’t power artificial intelligence brains, it can help manage the environment in which those brains operate, anchoring identities, coordinating payments, and maintaining user control.
Read more: Ethereum Foundation launches new AI team to support proxy payments
