Ethereum Foundation: Building the Ethereum Network into an AI Trust Layer

Odaily News Davide Crapis, Head of AI at the Ethereum Foundation, stated in an interview with CoinDesk at NEARCON 2026 that as AI reshapes fields such as finance and cybersecurity, Ethereum will not integrate with AI at the raw computational power level. Instead, it will serve as a coordination and verification layer in an increasingly AI-driven world.

Crapis pointed out that if AI systems lack attributes such as decentralization, self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, and privacy, and people rely on AI to handle everything, then these attributes will cease to exist. Ethereum's AI strategy is not to compete with OpenAI or Google on model scale, but to ensure that when AI becomes the interface of the internet, it does not quietly lead to a recentralization of power.

The strategy encompasses two main directions: The first is decentralized AI coordination, which involves providing infrastructure for autonomous AI agents, including identity recognition, trust establishment, and payment exchange. The computational work of AI is still completed off-chain, while Ethereum supports the discovery and verification between agents through public registries, transparent historical records, payment routing, and cryptographic proofs. The related standard protocol, ERC-8004, is already under development. The second direction is introducing core principles such as privacy, openness, censorship resistance, and security into the AI field, encouraging more AI processing to be completed on users' local devices to reduce the amount of information transmitted to centralized servers.

Crapis also mentioned that AI systems may automate and scale up cyberattacks in the future, posing challenges to traditional authentication methods. Cryptographic keys will become increasingly important due to their mathematically verifiable nature.