The value of Ethereum is not just faster and cheaper, but rather preserving a verifiable, exit-able, and self-controlled technological base for users.

Written by: imToken

Recently, Vitalik has mentioned a somewhat unfamiliar term multiple times: 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 it will focus primarily on Ethereum's censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security, which is CROPS, and serve users' self-sovereignty while maintaining resistance to extraction and a more seamless user experience.

This statement is actually very important, especially when AI starts to enter wallet and automated execution scenarios; CROPS is no longer just a value issue for Ethereum but may 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, one must first step outside a common misconception: while Ethereum certainly needs to enhance performance and reduce costs, it is not merely a competition of speed or fees compared to other public chains.

Although speed and cost are indeed the most intuitive from a short-term user experience perspective, if we extend the time frame, Ethereum has been increasingly clear in its attitude over the past two years: what it truly seeks 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, yielding ultimate control, or being randomly interrupted by a centralized service.

This is the significance of CROPS.

In the context of the EF Mandate, CROPS mainly points to five directions, which are also abbreviations of their keywords: Censorship Resistance, Capture Resistance (this was actually a later addition by Vitalik), Open Source, Privacy, Security, which are censorship resistance, capture resistance, open source, privacy, and security:

• C - Censorship Resistance: Ensuring the immutability of transactions and smart contracts, not terminated by any external political or centralized entity pressure;
• R - Capture Resistance: Preventing the governance, development trajectory, and key entry points of Ethereum from being long-term controlled by a few interest parties;
• O - Open Source / Openness: Adherence to complete open-source code, maintaining absolute freedom of access within the ecosystem;
• P - Privacy: Retaining the right to not be spied upon through cryptographic techniques on a transparent ledger;
• S - Security: Upholding foundational bottom lines, providing unassailable ultimate settlement security;

When viewed together, these items represent a set of clearly oriented screening and guiding principles, aligning with Ethereum's long-standing value route.

For example, at the protocol level, it means Ethereum needs to continuously improve censorship resistance, client diversity, validator decentralization, formal verification, etc.; at the application level, wallets, RPC, browsers, signing interfaces, and account systems also need to reduce reliance on centralized entries; at the user experience level, security cannot depend solely on users understanding complex transactions, but must make risks visible before actions occur through clearer signature displays, more verifiable interactions, and enhanced risk warnings.

This is why the EF has recently advanced some more specific directions around security, privacy, protocol resilience, and ecological public goods, such as the Ethereum Audit Subsidy program, which aims to lower the threshold for Ethereum ecosystem developers to obtain high-quality security audits. Furthermore, this is not just a subsidy for expenses, but a shift of "security" from a high-cost service affordable only to a few large projects to more small and medium developers.

In late May, Vitalik again shared his views on the future direction of the EF, emphasizing that the EF should become a smaller, more outspoken organization that focuses more on long-term sustainability rather than trying to cover all needs within the ecosystem. The reasons are quite realistic, as the EF does not have unlimited resources and lacks a continuous income source from staking or transaction fees; thus, it should invest its limited resources into tasks that are crucial to realizing CROPS values for Ethereum and are difficult for other parties to reliably undertake.

In other words, in this historical transitional phase that Ethereum is currently in, CROPS is not an abstract slogan of "ideals over reality," but rather a definition and constraint from the outside of what the EF should or should not do.

2. When CROPS meets AI: The intersection of two parallel universes

Vitalik Buterin recently placed CROPS into a broader discussion in 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 within approximately 90 GB of video memory, with speeds of about 35 tok/s on Apple hardware and about 7 tok/s on AMD hardware, indicating that true "CROPS AI" should support multiple hardware platforms, not just "decentralized AI."

He also pointed out the significant overlap between the CROPS Ethereum access layer and CROPS AI, such as implementing payment for remote LLM calls using zero-knowledge proofs, along with Ethereum private RPC reading. In the future, more AI models finely tuned for Ethereum scenarios are expected to emerge to enhance smart contracts, protocol codes, and ecological security.

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

In the past, when discussing AI, we often focused on model capabilities, such as whether it can write code, especially whether it can replace humans in handling complex tasks. However, from a user security perspective, the true change brought by AI is not merely "stronger capabilities," but that it is changing the entry points of digital operations.

As has been said before, previous applications were relatively clear interfaces. We opened wallets to transfer, opened DApps to trade, opened browsers to search, and opened social products to post, each application had relatively clear boundaries, but after the emergence of AI Agents, these boundaries become increasingly blurred. Users no longer click through functions one by one but express intents using natural language:

Help me find the optimal cross-chain path, help me make an exchange, help me organize my assets, help me call a certain DeFi strategy, help me generate and send a transaction...

This sounds very convenient, but it also means a more important question: when AI becomes your digital agent, what transactions is it actually signing on your behalf, and what privacy might be exposed?

If AI runs entirely in a centralized cloud, users' asset information, transaction intentions, address relationships, identity preferences, and operational habits could be concentrated 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 reasoning processes. Users may find it more convenient, but it becomes harder to know what exactly they have given up.

This is the question CROPS AI needs to address.

An AI more aligned with CROPS should not only have strong capabilities but also be as censorship-resistant, open, privacy-protecting, and secure as possible. It should ideally be able to run locally, minimizing dependence on centralized cloud services, reducing the risk of information leakage, and allowing users to understand, confirm, and retain ultimate control.

In other words, AI cannot be just a more intelligent black box; especially in the Web3 context, AI may not just help you summarize articles, write code, or provide customer service, but it may directly participate in asset management and automated execution.

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

This is why there will be intersections between the CROPS Ethereum access layer and CROPS AI.

3. What incremental Web3 opportunities can be explored at this intersection?

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

Because whether it's Ethereum or AI, the core problem faced by users is becoming the same—how do I use AI assistance without completely giving my privacy, identity, assets, and choice to centralized intermediaries?

• On the Ethereum side, this issue manifests as how users access on-chain data? How do they connect to RPC? How do they sign transactions? How do they confirm whether DApp interactions are safe? How do they avoid having all wallet queries, balance reads, and transaction broadcasts go through a few centralized services?
• On the AI side, this issue manifests as how users call models? How do they ensure prompts and personal data are not misused? How can local models handle sensitive tasks? How can they minimize exposing their identity and intentions when remote large model capabilities are needed?

These two sets of questions may seem different but are fundamentally similar.

For example, when Ethereum users query balances, read transaction histories, or simulate transaction results, they often need to go through RPC services, which seem like mere technical interfaces, but they could know your IP, address, querying habits, asset structures, and interaction paths, which if collected could gradually piece together the user's on-chain privacy.

However, AI users calling remote models may also expose their preferences, financial information, and even identity clues, and if in the future users use AI to handle wallet operations, the risks could be further magnified.

So, the ZK paid remote LLM calls and private Ethereum RPC reads that Vitalik mentioned essentially try to solve the same problem—that is, how to access remote capabilities without exposing all personal information?

This is also where the intersection of CROPS Ethereum and CROPS AI lies: on one side is a more private, verifiable, and trust-minimized on-chain access layer; on the other side is a more open, localized, and secure AI execution environment. Together, they could form a new entry point for users to enter the digital world.

Following the fundamental logic of CROPS outward, the entire Web3 ecosystem (especially the wallet layer as a traffic entry point) will undoubtedly take on more roles:

When users begin to express on-chain needs in natural language, wallets become not just a signing tool but a console for users' digital actions. They need to help users judge whether this DApp can connect? What will actually happen in this transaction? Is this AI Agent calling unnecessary data?

From this perspective, CROPS is not an abstract value concept but will directly influence the design direction of wallet products and drive the next decade's development shift toward integrating Web3 interaction experiences and wallets.

In Conclusion

Although in the current market conditions, many may not pay much attention to purely conceptual discussions.

The colder the market, the easier it is to overlook those technical variables that may not seem attractive in the short term, but will truly determine direction in the long term.

The reason CROPS deserves attention is not that it created a new hot topic, but because it puts the long-term issues of Ethereum and AI into a shared framework for rethinking: as digital systems grow stronger, can users still retain their control?

After all, security and privacy cannot just be a patch after the fact.

From this viewpoint, in an era where AI is accelerating its takeover of the digital world, it may be the true positive variable that makes Ethereum continue to be worth building and using.

In an era where AI is accelerating its takeover of the digital world, a more understandable, verifiable, private, and secure system may be the real reason Ethereum continues to be worth building and using.