Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared an updated perspective on the convergence of Ethereum and AGI. According to him, the ecosystem will soon be able to give AI the ability to interact with each other on an economic level.
Buterin believes that the key goal now is to develop a more viable decentralized infrastructure for AI. This will reduce centralized control and create a distributed governance model within the ERC-8004 standard.
He emphasizes that this is just one element of a broader picture of Ethereum‘s development. Nevertheless, the ecosystem can already serve as an economic layer for AI interaction. This includes decentralized authorization of API requests, bots hiring each other, the use of collateral, and on-chain dispute resolution.
In Buterin’s opinion, it is important to create tools that make interaction between AI agents as trustless and, if necessary, as private as possible.
He also noted that in the short term, this can be achieved through local LLM tools and zero-knowledge payments for API requests. This approach allows access to remote models without having to link user identities between calls.
Separately, Buterin highlighted the need for further work on cryptographic solutions. These include increasing AI privacy, client-side verification of cryptographic proofs, the use of TEE attestations, and other server-side protection mechanisms.
Buterin Says Ethereum and AGI Are Philosophically Aligned
According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the intersection of Ethereum and AGI is of great interest, but many people view these areas from completely different philosophical positions. He notes that the development of Ethereum and AGI should be approached in the same way, choosing a conscious and positive direction, not mindless acceleration of both processes.
Buterin believes it is important to combine perspectives from the worlds of AI and cryptocurrency. In his opinion, without such integration, the development of both technologies could go in the wrong direction.
“Within blockchain ecosystems and at the intersection of AI and cryptography, there are indeed promising use cases. But it is very important to be extremely careful about how exactly AI is used,” — Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder
At the same time, Buterin previously pointed out a serious contradiction between security approaches in the crypto industry and in AI. In cryptocurrencies, he says, truly reliable systems can only be built with open source.
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With AI, the situation is different. Open models or publishing training data significantly increases vulnerability to attacks using malicious machine learning methods. This creates a difficult balance between transparency, security, and privacy that the industry has yet to solve.
Buterin Criticizes Anatoly Yakovenko’s Narrow View of AGI
In a long post on X Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, known as Toly. He disagreed with what he called Yakovenko’s overly narrow view of AGI. According to Buterin, this perception of AGI is like trying to reduce Ethereum to just working with finance or computing.
Buterin also emphasized strengthening the role of humans, security issues, and protection from potential threats from superintelligent systems. He stressed the importance of practical steps, including updating markets and developing governance structures. At the same time, he noted that some skeptics see discussions about AGI as a departure from previous Ethereum narratives. Meanwhile, many developers, on the contrary, positively assess the move toward self-sustaining AI agents.
Hyperbolic Labs co-founder and CTO Yuchen Jin believes that ideas of “self-development” of AI and the imminent appearance of AGI remain an illusion without constant model training.
A similar point of view was previously expressed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to him, the path to true AGI will not be one big breakthrough and will require a series of gradual achievements. At the same time, Altman believes the industry is already close to this goal. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella disagrees, stating that true AGI is still very far away and this is a matter of reality, not the claims of individual people.
Buterin himself notes that LLMs are capable of overcoming the limitations of many theoretical concepts. He points out that prediction markets, decision-making systems, decentralized governance, combinatorial auctions, quadratic voting, and a universal barter economy have long been limited by human attention and decision-making ability. In his opinion, LLMs can scale human judgment many times over.
In addition, Buterin believes that the Ethereum network can bring these ideas to life if we return to his early concepts from 2014. He emphasizes that many new and stronger approaches can be added to them, and AI and zero-knowledge technologies will provide tools for their practical implementation.
