【Ethereum Foundation: Building Ethereum as an AI Trust Layer】

Odaily Planet Daily reported that Davide Crapis, Head of AI at the Ethereum Foundation, stated in an interview with CoinDesk at NEARCON 2026 that as AI reshapes fields like finance and cybersecurity, Ethereum will not integrate with AI at the raw computational layer but 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, autonomy, censorship resistance, and privacy, and people rely on AI to handle everything, these attributes will disappear. Ethereum's AI strategy is not about competing with models like OpenAI or Google in scale but about ensuring that AI, as an interface to the internet, does not quietly lead to a re-centralization of power. The strategy includes two main directions: first, decentralized AI coordination, which provides infrastructure for autonomous AI agents to establish identity, trust, and payment exchanges. AI computations are still performed off-chain, while Ethereum supports discovery and verification among agents through public registries, transparent histories, payment routing, and cryptographic proofs. The related standard protocol ERC-8004 is under development; second, integrating core principles such as privacy, openness, censorship resistance, and security into the AI domain, encouraging more AI processing to be done locally on user devices to reduce data transmission to centralized servers. Crapis also mentioned that future AI systems might automate and scale up cyberattacks, challenging traditional authentication methods, while cryptographic keys will become even more important due to their mathematically verifiable properties.