In the past period, 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, explicitly stating that it will prioritize censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security, which is CROPS, to serve user self-sovereignty while maintaining resistance to extraction and a more seamless user experience.

This sentence is actually very important, especially when AI begins to enter wallet and automated execution scenarios, CROPS will no longer be limited to the value issues of 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 jump out of a common misconception that Ethereum certainly needs to enhance performance and reduce costs, but it is not just about competing with other public chains on speed and lower fees.

While speed and cost are indeed the most intuitive from a short-term user experience perspective, if we extend the time frame, Ethereum's attitude has become increasingly clear over the past two years: what it truly wants to provide is a deeper set of capabilities: users can hold assets, express identity, sign transactions, and participate in coordination without relying on a single platform, without giving up ultimate control, and without arbitrary interruptions by any centralized service.

This is the significance of CROPS.

In the context of the EF Mandate, CROPS mainly points to five directions, which are also the acronyms of its keywords: Censorship Resistance, Capture Resistance (which Vitalik actually added later), Open Source, Privacy, Security, which means resistance to censorship, resistance to capture, openness, privacy, and security:

• C - Censorship Resistance: Ensuring the immutability of transactions and smart contracts, not terminating due to pressure from any external political or centralized entity;
• R - Capture Resistance: Preventing the governance, development path, and key entry points of Ethereum from being controlled by a few interested parties for a long time;
• O - Open Source / Openness: Adhering to complete open-source code, maintaining absolute freedom of access in the ecosystem;
• P - Privacy: Retaining the right to not be spied on through cryptographic technology on a transparent ledger;
• S - Security: Upholding the bottom line of the underlying layer, providing unassailable ultimate settlement security;

When viewed together, these items form a very clear set of guidelines and orientations, which also aligns well with Ethereum's consistent value orientation.

For example, at the protocol level, it means that Ethereum needs to continuously improve its censorship resistance, client diversity, validator decentralization, formal verification, etc.; at the application level, wallets, RPC, browsers, signature interfaces, and account systems also need to reduce dependence on centralized entry points; at the user experience level, security cannot rely solely on users understanding complex transactions but must be presented through clearer signature displays, more verifiable interactions, and better risk reminders, putting risks upfront before operations take place.

This is also why the EF has recently promoted some more specific directions around security, privacy, protocol resilience, and ecological public goods; for example, the Ethereum Audit Subsidy program attempts to lower the threshold for Ethereum ecosystem developers to obtain high-quality security audits. It can even be extended to say that this is not just a subsidy for costs but further pushes "security" from being a high-cost service that only a few large projects can afford towards more small and medium developers.

In late May, Vitalik also discussed his views on the future direction of the EF again, emphasizing that the EF should become a smaller-scale, more clearly positioned organization that focuses more on long-term sustainability rather than trying to cover all needs within the ecosystem. This is also quite realistic; after all, the EF does not possess unlimited resources and does not have a continuous income source from staking or transaction fees, so it should invest its limited resources into tasks that are critical for achieving the CROPS values of Ethereum and are also difficult for other parties to reliably undertake.

In other words, in this transitional historical stage that Ethereum is currently in, CROPS is not an abstract slogan of "ideals precede reality," but more like an external definition and constraint on what the EF should and should not do.

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

Recently, Vitalik Buterin brought CROPS into a larger discussion within the context of AI.

On May 28, Vitalik Buterin posted an update on his localized AI progress, stating that DeepSeek V4 has launched a 2-bit quantized version that can run within about 90 GB of memory, with a speed of about 35 tok/s on Apple hardware and about 7 tok/s on AMD hardware, and stated that true "CROPS AI" should support multiple hardware platforms, not just "decentralized AI."

At the same time, he pointed out that the CROPS Ethereum access layer and CROPS AI have significant intersections, for example, achieving paid remote LLM calls through zero-knowledge proofs and private Ethereum RPC reads. In the future, there should also be more AI models fine-tuned for Ethereum scenarios to enhance smart contracts, protocol code, and ecosystem security.

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

In the past, when we discussed AI, we often focused on model capabilities such as whether it can write code, especially if it can take over complex tasks from humans. However, from a user security perspective, the real change brought by AI is not just "more capable," but that it is changing the entry points for digital operations.

The old saying goes, previously applications were relatively clear interfaces; we opened our 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 appearance of AI Agents, these boundaries will become increasingly blurred, and users will no longer click on functions one by one but will express intents in natural language:

Help me find the optimal cross-chain path, help me make a swap, help me organize assets, help me call a certain DeFi strategy, help me generate and send transactions...

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

If AI is entirely run on centralized cloud services, the user's asset information, transaction intentions, address relationships, identity preferences, and operational habits may be concentrated in the hands of a few service providers, especially when executing on-chain operations that rely on opaque APIs, centralized RPC, black-box plugins, and unverifiable reasoning processes; users may become more convenient but also harder to know exactly what they are giving up.

This is the question CROPS AI needs to answer.

An AI that better aligns with CROPS should not only be powerful but should also be as censorship-resistant, open, privacy-protective, and secure as possible. It should ideally be able to run locally, at least minimizing dependence on centralized cloud services in sensitive scenarios, reducing information leakage, and allowing users to understand, confirm, and retain ultimate control.

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

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

This is also why the CROPS Ethereum access layer and CROPS AI will have intersections.

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

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

Because whether in Ethereum or AI, the core question users face is becoming the same—how can I use AI assistance without completely handing over my privacy, identity, assets, and choices to centralized intermediaries?

• On the Ethereum side, this question manifests as how users access on-chain data? How to connect RPC? How to sign transactions? How to confirm whether DApp interactions are safe? How to avoid all wallet inquiries, balance reads, and transaction broadcasts going through a few centralized services?
• On the AI side, this question manifests as how users call models? How to ensure prompts and personal data are not misused? How to have local models handle sensitive tasks? How to minimize exposing one's identity and intentions when needing remote large model capabilities?

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

For example, when Ethereum users query balances, read transaction history, or simulate transaction results, they often need to go through RPC services. Although RPC seems merely a technical interface, it may know your IP, address, query habits, asset structure, and interaction paths. If this data is collected centrally, users’ privacy on-chain can gradually be pieced together.

But when AI users call remote models, they may also expose their preferences, financial information, and even identity clues. If in the future users use AI to handle wallet operations, the risks will further amplify.

Therefore, what Vitalik mentioned regarding ZK paid remote LLM calls and private Ethereum RPC reads is essentially trying to solve the same problem, which is how to gain services when calling remote capabilities without exposing all of one's information?

This is also where the intersection of CROPS Ethereum and CROPS AI lies, 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. Together, they may form a new entry point for users to enter the digital world.

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

As users begin to express on-chain needs in natural language, wallets will not just be a signing tool but a control panel for users' digital actions. They need to help users determine whether this DApp can connect? What will happen with this transaction? Is this AI Agent calling unnecessary data?

From this perspective, CROPS is not an abstract value but will directly impact the design direction of wallet products and drive the development shift in the next decade to integrate Web3 interaction experiences and the wallet sector.

In conclusion

Although in the current market conditions, many may not pay much attention to pure concepts.

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

The reason CROPS is worth attention is not because it has created a new hotspot but because it places Ethereum and AI's long-term issues within the same framework for re-understanding: when digital systems become increasingly powerful, can users still retain their control?

After all, security and privacy cannot just be after-the-fact patches.

From this perspective, in an era where AI is accelerating the takeover of the digital world, it may be the true positive variable for Ethereum to continue to be built and used.

In an era where AI is accelerating the takeover of the digital world, being more understandable, verifiable, privacy-centric, and secure may be the real reason why Ethereum continues to deserve construction and use.

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