From Ethereum to AI's "CROPS": What Exactly is This Set of "Slow Variables" Vitalik Keeps Emphasizing?

Over the past period, Vitalik has frequently mentioned a somewhat unfamiliar term: CROPS.

The systematic emergence of this concept can be traced back to March 13. The Ethereum Foundation board released the "EF Mandate" document, clearly stating that its primary focus will be on Ethereum's censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security—namely, CROPS—to serve user sovereignty while maintaining extractability resistance and a more seamless user experience.

This statement is actually very important, especially as AI begins to enter wallet and automated execution scenarios. CROPS will no longer be limited to Ethereum's values issue but could potentially become a question of whether users can continue to control their digital lives in the AI era.

1. What Exactly is CROPS?

To understand CROPS, we must first step out of a common misconception: Ethereum certainly needs to improve performance and reduce costs, but it is not just about competing with other public chains on who is faster or has lower fees.

Although speed and cost are the most intuitive metrics from a short-term user experience perspective, looking at the longer term, Ethereum's attitude over the past two years has become increasingly clear. What it truly aims to provide is a set of more fundamental capabilities: users can hold assets, express identity, sign transactions, and participate in coordination without relying on a single platform, handing over ultimate control, or being arbitrarily blocked by a centralized service.

This is the significance of CROPS.

In the context of the EF Mandate, CROPS primarily points to five directions, which are the acronyms of their keywords: Censorship Resistance, Capture Resistance (actually supplemented later by Vitalik), Open Source, Privacy, and Security:

• C - Censorship Resistance: Ensuring the immutability of transactions and smart contracts, preventing termination due to external political pressure or centralized entities.
• R - Capture Resistance: Preventing Ethereum's governance, development roadmap, and key access points from being controlled by a minority of stakeholders over the long term.
• O - Open Source / Openness: Maintaining fully open-source code and ensuring absolute freedom of entry into the ecosystem.
• P - Privacy: Using cryptographic techniques to provide users with the right not to be spied on, even on a transparent ledger.
• S - Security: Upholding the bottom line to provide unbreakable, ultimate settlement security.

Viewed together, these constitute a clearly oriented set of screening and guiding principles, which aligns well with Ethereum's long-standing value trajectory.

For example, at the protocol layer, this means Ethereum needs to continuously improve censorship resistance, client diversity, validator decentralization, formal verification, etc. At the application layer, wallets, RPCs, browsers, signature interfaces, and account systems need to reduce reliance on centralized entry points. At the user experience layer, security cannot rely solely on users understanding complex transactions themselves; instead, risks should be proactively addressed before operations occur through clearer signature displays, more verifiable interactions, and better risk warnings.

This is also why the EF has recently promoted more specific directions around security, privacy, protocol resilience, and ecosystem public goods. For instance, the Ethereum Audit Subsidy program aims to lower the barrier for developers in the Ethereum ecosystem to access high-quality security audits. Extending this perspective, this isn't just about subsidizing costs; it's about pushing "security" from being an expensive service accessible only to large projects towards more small and medium-sized developers.

In late May, Vitalik also revisited his views on the EF's future direction, emphasizing that the EF should become a smaller, more opinionated organization focused on long-term sustainability, rather than trying to cover every need in the ecosystem. The reason is practical: the EF does not have unlimited resources or a continuous revenue stream from staking or transaction fees. Therefore, it should allocate its limited resources to tasks that are crucial for Ethereum to realize CROPS values and that other entities cannot reliably undertake.

In other words, at this current transformative historical stage for Ethereum, CROPS is not an abstract slogan where "ideology trumps reality," but rather an external definition constraining what the EF should and should not do.

2. When CROPS Meets AI: The Intersection of Two Parallel Universes

Vitalik Buterin's most recent push of CROPS into broader discussion was within the context of AI.

On May 28, Vitalik Buterin posted an update on his localized AI progress, stating that DeepSeek V4 has released a 2-bit quantized version that can run in approximately 90 GB of VRAM, achieving speeds of about 35 tok/s on Apple hardware and 7 tok/s on AMD hardware. He also argued that a true "CROPS AI" should support multiple hardware platforms, not just be "decentralized AI."

Furthermore, he pointed out a significant overlap between the CROPS Ethereum access layer and CROPS AI, such as using zero-knowledge proofs for paid remote LLM calls and private Ethereum RPC reads. He suggested that more AI models fine-tuned for Ethereum scenarios should emerge to enhance smart contract, protocol code, and ecosystem security.

This essentially places Ethereum and AI within the same problem framework.

In the past, discussions about AI often focused on model capabilities, such as its ability to write code, especially to handle complex tasks on behalf of humans. However, from a user security perspective, the real change brought by AI isn't just "greater capability"; it's that AI is changing the entry points for digital operations.

As often discussed, applications used to be relatively clear interfaces: we open a wallet to transfer, open a DApp to trade, open a browser to search, open a social product to post – each application has relatively clear boundaries. But with the advent of AI Agents, these boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred. Users will no longer click on functions one by one but will express their intent using natural language:

"Help me find the best cross-chain path," "Make a swap for me," "Help me organize my assets," "Execute a DeFi strategy for me," "Generate and send a transaction for me..."

This sounds very convenient, but it also raises a more important question: when AI becomes your digital agent, what exactly is it signing on your behalf, and what privacy is it exposing?

If the AI runs entirely on a centralized cloud, user asset information, transaction intents, address relationships, identity preferences, and operational habits could be centralized in the hands of a few service providers. Especially when executing on-chain operations relying on opaque APIs, centralized RPCs, black-box plugins, and unverifiable inference processes, users may become more convenient but also find it harder to know what they have actually given away.

This is the question that CROPS AI seeks to answer.

An AI more aligned with CROPS is not just powerful; it should also be as censorship-resistant, open, privacy-preserving, and secure as possible. Ideally, it should run locally, minimize reliance on centralized cloud services particularly in sensitive scenarios, reduce information leakage, and enable the user to understand, confirm, and retain ultimate control.

In other words, AI cannot just be a smarter black box. Especially in the Web3 context, AI might in the future not just summarize articles, write code, or handle customer service, but directly participate in asset management and automated execution.

The closer it gets to user assets, the more important CROPS becomes.

This is also why the CROPS Ethereum access layer and CROPS AI intersect.

3. What Web3 Incremental Opportunities Can Be Found at This Intersection?

From this perspective, Vitalik's recent mention of the intersection between the CROPS Ethereum Access Layer and CROPS AI is very natural.

Whether for Ethereum or AI, the core problem users face is converging into the same one: How can I use AI assistance without completely surrendering my privacy, identity, assets, and autonomy to centralized intermediaries?

• On the Ethereum side, this problem manifests as: How do users access on-chain data? How do they connect to an RPC? How do they sign transactions? How do they confirm DApp interaction safety? How can they avoid having all wallet queries, balance reads, and transaction broadcasts go through a few centralized services?
• On the AI side, this problem manifests as: How do users call models? How can prompts and personal data be prevented from misuse? How can local models handle sensitive tasks? How can they avoid exposing their identity and intent when needing remote large model capabilities?

While seemingly different, the underlying structure of these two sets of problems is very similar.

For example, when Ethereum users check balances, read transaction history, or simulate transaction outcomes, they often need to go through an RPC service. An RPC may seem like just a technical interface, but it can know your IP, address, query habits, asset structure, and interaction paths. If this data is collected centrally, a user's on-chain privacy can be pieced together.

Similarly, when AI users call remote models, they may also expose their preferences, financial information, or even identity clues. If, in the future, users rely on AI for wallet operations, the risks will amplify further.

Therefore, Vitalik's mention of ZK-paid remote LLM calls and private Ethereum RPC reads is essentially an attempt to solve the same problem: How can one access remote capabilities and obtain services without exposing all their information?

This is the intersection of CROPS Ethereum and CROPS AI. On one side is a more private, more verifiable, and less trust-dependent on-chain access layer. On the other side is a more open, more localized, and more secure AI execution environment. Combined, they could form a new gateway for users entering the digital world.

Extending outward along CROPS's underlying logic, the entire Web3 ecosystem (especially the wallet layer as a traffic gateway) will undoubtedly take on more roles:

When users start expressing on-chain needs in natural language, a wallet is no longer just a signing tool; it becomes the user's console for digital actions. It needs to help users decide whether this DApp can be connected, what exactly will happen with this transaction, and whether this AI Agent is accessing unnecessary data.

From this perspective, CROPS is not an abstract value system. It will directly influence the design direction of wallet products and drive the evolution of integrating Web3 interaction experiences and the wallet track over the next decade.

Final Thoughts

Although in the current market climate, many people might not have as high an interest in purely conceptual discussions.

But the colder the market, the easier it is to overlook technological variables that are not sexy in the short term but truly determine the long-term direction.

CROPS is worth paying attention to, not because it creates a new hype, but because it reframes the long-term issues of Ethereum and AI within a single framework: As digital systems become more powerful, can users still retain their own control?

After all, security and privacy cannot just be afterthought patches.

From this perspective, in an era where AI is accelerating its takeover of the digital world, this might be the truly positive variable that makes Ethereum worth continuing to build upon and use.

In an era of AI's accelerating takeover of the digital world, being more understandable, more verifiable, more private, and more secure might be the real reason Ethereum remains worth building upon and using.