Ethereum Foundation: Building the Ethereum Network into an AI Trust Layer Odaily Planet Daily News: Davide Crapis, the AI director of the Ethereum Foundation, stated in an interview with CoinDesk at NEARCON 2026 that as AI reshapes fields such as finance and cybersecurity, Ethereum will not merge with AI at the level of raw computing power, but rather serve as a coordinating and validating layer in an increasingly AI dominated 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 all transactions, then these attributes will no longer exist. Ethereum's AI strategy is not to compete with OpenAI or Google for model size, but to ensure that AI will not quietly lead to re centralization of power when it becomes an Internet interface. This strategy includes two major directions: one is decentralized AI coordination, which provides an infrastructure for identity recognition, trust establishment, and payment exchange for autonomous AI agents. AI computing work is still completed off chain, while Ethereum supports discovery and verification between agents through a public registry, transparent history records, payment routing, and encrypted proof. The relevant standard protocol ERC-8004 is already under development; The second is to introduce core principles such as privacy, openness, censorship resistance, and security into the field of AI, encouraging more AI processing to be completed on users' local devices and reducing the amount of information transmitted to centralized servers. Crapis also stated that AI systems may automate and expand the scale of network attacks in the future, posing challenges to traditional authentication methods, while encryption keys will become even more important due to their mathematically verifiable nature.