เมื่อ AI Coding เริ่มเข้ามาควบคุมทุกสิ่ง ทำไม Ethereum ถึงยังคงเน้นย้ำเรื่องความปลอดภัยและการกระจายศูนย์?

At the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, Vitalik Buterin inevitably brought up that perennial question: What exactly is Ethereum supposed to become?

In reality, over the past few years, the crypto industry has grown accustomed to discussing public chain competition solely through performance metrics—whoever has higher TPS, faster confirmation speeds, or lower gas fees is more likely to be labeled the "next-generation infrastructure," and so on.

But by 2026, whether it's Ethereum or new public chains, the challenges they face are no longer limited to internal topics like DeFi, NFTs, L2 scaling, and on-chain finance. AI coding is rapidly absorbing everything, and progress in formal verification and zero-knowledge proofs has also been significant.

This all signals new shifts in the world public chains confront. So, do we still need a public infrastructure that everyone can verify, exit, self-custody, and operate without single points of control?

And how exactly is Ethereum thinking about and preparing for this?

1. What is Ethereum For: The Bulletin Board and Computation

"Ethereum is not trying to compete with high-frequency trading platforms. Ethereum is not trying to be the fastest chain. Ethereum aims to be a secure chain, a decentralized chain, a chain that stays online and is one you can always rely on," Vitalik explained in his speech, reinterpreting Ethereum's value using two very basic concepts: First, Ethereum is like a "public bulletin board"; second, Ethereum provides "computation" capabilities.

These two simple concepts not only encapsulate Ethereum's new positioning direction we've been elaborating on recently, but also almost summarize the fundamental reasons why Ethereum differs from ordinary internet services.

The so-called public bulletin board is not an abstract metaphor. It means applications can post messages on Ethereum, and everyone can see the content and sequence of these messages. These messages can be transactions, hashes, encrypted data, or other information requiring public commitment, ordering, and verification (For further reading: From "Global Computer / Settlement Layer" to "Bulletin Board": What Do Ethereum and Vitalik Want to Do?).

This is also the most fundamental difference between Ethereum and an ordinary server. A server can be faster, cheaper, and more efficient, but it typically requires users to trust that the operator won't tamper with records, deny service, or shut down the system at a critical moment. Ethereum provides that capability.

Computation refers to Ethereum allowing people to create shared digital objects controlled by code. These objects can be ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, ENS names, or DAOs, on-chain organizations, financial protocols, and other more complex applications.

Therefore, by 2026, if you still only understand Ethereum through "performance," or simply compare TPS, gas costs, and confirmation speeds with new public chains, you can easily miss the real problems Ethereum is set to solve next.

Scaling public chains in the coming years is no longer just about "making the chain faster." The focus is on how to retain verifiability, decentralization, and user self-sovereignty within increasingly complex application scenarios. In other words, scaling isn't about transforming Ethereum into another centralized high-performance system; it's about allowing more applications to run without compromising underlying trust assumptions.

This is also the key reason Vitalik has been re-evaluating L2s since the beginning of this year.

Simply put, he feels the market has been more accustomed to viewing L2s simply as Ethereum's scaling tools—moving more transactions to L2s when the mainnet gets expensive or congested. However, the historical mission of L2s at this stage is complete; they cannot just remain at the level of "offloading transactions." Instead, they should become the frontier for extending Ethereum into more application scenarios.

This judgment is particularly crucial for today's Ethereum ecosystem.

Over the past few years, the market has often simplified L2s to "cheaper Ethereum." But in Vitalik's framework, L2s are not simple substitutes. They are functional extensions built around Ethereum's public base layer. L1 assumes the most critical roles of commitment, settlement, data publication, and verification. L2s and off-chain systems provide higher-frequency, more flexible, and more privacy-friendly execution capabilities tailored to specific application scenarios.

This is also why Vitalik is reluctant to make "fastest" Ethereum's primary goal.

Speed is certainly important, but if the cost of speed is that ordinary users cannot run nodes, verify state, or protect themselves when the system fails, then that chain will gradually become a less efficient centralized service.

For Ethereum, speed is a matter of user experience; security and decentralization are its raison d'être.

2. In the AI Era, Ethereum's Value is Magnified Anew

The most noteworthy aspect of this speech is that Vitalik didn't treat AI merely as an external trend; he placed it within the technical context of Ethereum's future roadmap.

For instance, the Ethereum community has already begun experimenting with applying AI to generate code proofs, demonstrating that software versions running Ethereum possess the characteristics they should have. Two years ago, this was very difficult to achieve, but the rapid development of AI is making software security verification easier.

Behind this lies a very realistic problem: as the assets, identities, organizations, and rules carried by blockchains increase, the cost of code vulnerabilities also rises. If AI can help developers find vulnerabilities, generate proofs, and assist with formal verification, it becomes not just an efficiency tool for the application layer but also part of protocol security engineering (For further reading: As Hackers "More Efficiently" Use AI, How Will the Web3 "Spear and Shield" Arms Race Escalate?).

But AI's deeper impact on Ethereum is not just on the development side, but also on the user side, especially in changing how ordinary users interact with digital systems.

As we know, human-computer interaction has undergone several major shifts over the past few decades. Initially, users interacted with computers via command lines, and only a few technically skilled people could truly use complex systems. Later, graphical interfaces and mobile apps became widespread, allowing ordinary users to complete operations through buttons, pages, and menus.

Now, AI is pushing interaction towards natural language. Users no longer need to understand every step; they just need to state their goal, and the system can automatically break down the path, call tools, and execute the task.

This shift will have an even greater impact in Web3.

Today, for a user to complete a cross-chain DeFi operation, they often need to select the network, confirm gas, authorize contracts, execute a swap, bridge assets, and deposit into a protocol themselves. Each step requires a signature, and each step is prone to errors. If, in the future, AI Agents become the primary gateway to wallets and on-chain applications, users might only need to say: "Convert some of my ETH into stablecoins and deposit them into a yield protocol following a low-risk strategy." The remaining path planning, protocol selection, transaction simulation, and execution could be handled by an intelligent agent.

This sounds like it would drastically lower the barrier to entry. However, problems also arise. When users are no longer personally clicking through each step, and when an AI Agent understands intent, calls contracts, and initiates transactions on behalf of users, how can users be sure it hasn't exceeded its authority? How can they know the chosen path isn't malicious? How can they retain the ability to revoke, verify, and protect themselves without sacrificing user experience?

This is precisely where Ethereum's value is amplified.

AI can make operations more natural, but natural language itself doesn't bring trust. A smarter interface, if it's still an unverifiable black box system, means users are just shifting from "trusting the platform" to "trusting the model." Ethereum provides the trust infrastructure for the AI era.

Elaborating further, this also makes the role of the wallet more critical. The future wallet might no longer be just a "signing tool" or "asset list." It will gradually evolve into a permission management layer between the user and AI Agents, on-chain applications, identity systems, and payment networks. Users will need to set boundaries via their wallets—which operations can be executed automatically, which require secondary confirmation, which assets cannot be called upon, and which authorizations need regular checking and cleanup.

3. CROPS: From Foundation Charter to Community Covenant

Interestingly, just before Vitalik re-explained Ethereum from a protocol roadmap perspective, the Ethereum Foundation also released the EF Mandate, which serves as a formal confirmation of this direction at the value level.

This Mandate document states that the ultimate reason for Ethereum's existence is to protect users' self-sovereignty—enabling users to independently control their assets, identity, actions, and choices without relying on any centralized intermediary.

Around this principle, the EF Mandate introduces the acronym "CROPS," representing **C**ensorship Resistance, **R**esistance (Understood as part of the ethos, often Open Source is the 'O', but here it's listed as elements: Censorship Resistance, Open Source, Privacy, Security). Let's align properly: The acronym CROPS stands for **C**ensorship Resistance, **O**pen Source, **P**rivacy, **S**ecurity. In the Foundation's表述, Ethereum must first maintain these four attributes. Without these, Ethereum loses its reason for being worthy of use, building upon, and protecting.

Objectively speaking, terms like censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security are not new in the Web3 context. They have been discussed repeatedly since the early days of the crypto industry. However, re-emphasizing them today carries a significantly different meaning.

In the early days of crypto, discussing these values was primarily about opposing centralized platforms and financial intermediaries. Today, however, these values must also address new issues brought by the AI era. The EF Mandate mentions that future centralization might not just manifest as a platform forcibly controlling you, but also as you being completely unaware of how the system (especially AI) makes decisions on your behalf.

For example, when a recommendation algorithm decides what content you see, when an AI assistant screens information for you, when an intelligent agent executes transactions for you, when your identity, assets, and data are all encapsulated behind interfaces—user sovereignty can be subtly diluted through repeated experiences of "greater convenience."

Therefore, Ethereum's decentralization should not be understood solely in terms of node count, client diversity, or consensus mechanisms. It should be understood as a decentralized system where no single entity can easily change the rules. Users can verify the system state, developers can build freely, applications can be publicly audited, and assets and identities don't have to be entirely entrusted to a platform.

Vitalik also emphasized that decentralization is not just a feature of Ethereum; it is Ethereum's reason for being. Because if decentralization is lost, Ethereum is merely a less efficient centralized service. This statement also explains why the Ethereum community always stresses that "everyone is a Builder."

• In the Web2 era, most users were merely consumers of products. Platforms defined the rules, and users accepted them; platforms changed interfaces, and users adapted; platforms shut down services, and users had to migrate or give up;
• But in the Ethereum ecosystem, builders are not just a small group of core developers. They also include wallet developers, DApp developers, node operators, researchers, educators, auditors, community contributors, and even every ordinary user who diligently manages their private keys, learns about on-chain security, and participates in governance discussions.

This means CROPS should not remain a slogan; it needs to be realized through specific products and actions. Take a wallet like imToken, for example. Security is not just a warning message; it's a comprehensive experience encompassing mnemonic management, risk alerts, DApp authorization management, transaction parsing, phishing identification, and more.

Final Thoughts

Returning to Vitalik's speech at the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, on the surface, it discussed the technical roadmap for the next five years: scaling, zkEVM, post-quantum security, formal verification, privacy, block building, account abstraction, zkVM, and so on.

But on a deeper level, it was answering a question of value: When the entire industry is pursuing faster and cheaper, what exactly should Ethereum be optimizing for?

The answer is not to reject performance or user experience. Rather, it is to make on-chain applications easier for ordinary users to use, and this must serve self-sovereignty, security, verifiability, and fair participation, not trade these things for short-term efficiency.

The AI era will make this question even more acute.

From this perspective, what truly matters for Ethereum in the next phase might not be whether it can become the fastest chain, but whether it can continue to be the most trustworthy, easiest to verify, and least dependent on single points of authority as a public infrastructure.