⚡️I read Vitalik @VitalikButerin's newly published article on Ethereum × AI, and to be honest, it was quite impactful—

Unlike the one from 2024, he has finally pulled $ETH out of the predicament of insufficient application imagination and found a long-term viable new narrative!

He proposed a 2×2 construction space, clarifying the four intersecting directions that Ethereum is truly suitable for and worth pursuing in the AI era:

1⃣ Enabling more trust-minimized and simultaneously more private AI interactions

Vitalik emphasized that local models, ZK payments, privacy calls, client verification, and TEE proofs are all addressing one problem: AI is powerful → How can AI be used without being controlled?

If every call is tied to identity, account, and platform credit, then no matter how advanced the model is, the power structure will naturally flow back to the center.

Ethereum's role here is not to be a computing power market, but to provide a minimal trust settlement and proof carrier.

2⃣ Positioning ETH as the economic layer for AI-to-AI interactions

Vitalik proposed that in an open environment, decentralized collaboration without economic constraints is almost impossible to establish.

For AI to collaborate, divide labor, and call each other, there must be clear boundaries of cost, incentives, and responsibilities—

For example, whether API calls require collateral, how bots settle with each other, whether actions can be held accountable, and whether reputation and disputes can be standardized.

This is not about financializing AI, but about avoiding collaboration ultimately degrading into internal platform coordination; Ethereum is currently the only trusted foundation that can sustainably support such economic relationships.

3⃣ AI achieving the cyberpunk ideal of "don't trust, verify everything"

The complexity of modern systems has long exceeded the limits that individuals can audit, and the so-called verify everything is never feasible in reality.

The turning point Vitalik provided this time is:

Using local, controllable LLMs to bear the costs of understanding and verification, from verifying transactions, auditing contracts, to explaining the trust model of protocols, allowing AI to no longer be just a constrained object, but a tool to help individuals exercise sovereignty. Delegated to individuals.

4⃣ AI making more complex markets and governance mechanisms truly operational

Currently, prediction markets, decision markets, quadratic voting, and combinatorial auctions have remained at the theoretical level for a long time, not due to design errors, but because human attention and judgment are too scarce, easily captured by a few highly motivated participants over time.

AI can serve as an "auxiliary judgment layer" to lower the barriers to understanding and participation, while Ethereum provides a transparent, verifiable, and accountable execution environment, allowing these mechanisms to operate without relying on centralized arbiters.

From Vitalik's continuous and restrained reflections in this article, he does not attempt to save the price with short-term stories, but layer by layer seeks and constructs a long-term philosophical framework for Ethereum.

In the context of AI continuously amplifying capabilities and power, the hardest things to replace are not efficiency, but those constraints that cannot be easily bypassed—verification, settlement, responsibility, and exit.

This path is destined to be slow and lonely;

But from Ethereum's history over the years, it seems to have always relied on this unappealing persistence to reach today.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。