Human Freedom and Empowerment
People don’t always agree with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, but few could ever accuse him of being inconsistent.
Buterin recently put forward ideas on the convergence of AI and crypto and his position is much the same as it was in 2024.
The enigmatic Russian-Canadian believes AI’s development is headed in the wrong direction.
To his mind, the focus should not be on constructing more powerful systems, but on guiding AI development so that it can be a truly meaningful tool for the world’s people.
In a lengthy post on X [https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2020963864175657102], he described how he wanted an AI future where human freedom and empowerment were fostered.
In this future, “humans being relegated to retirement by AIs, and permanently stripped of power by human power structures that become impossible to surpass or escape” would not exist.
Buterin is also not too keen on the idea of the world blowing up, a scenario he describes as the “classic superintelligent AI doom”.
Economic Layer for AI-related Interactions
On a more serious note, the Ethereum man suggested that the development process should include tooling to make “more trustless and/or private interaction” with AIs possible.
This would include local large language model (LLM) tooling, ZK-payment for Application Programming Interface calls, cryptographic development to improve AI privacy, and “client-side verification of cryptographic proofs”.
Naturally, Buterin promoted Ethereum as an economic layer for AI-related interactions, offering API calls, bots-hiring-bots, security deposits, and “eventually more complicated contraptions like onchain dispute resolution”.
“The goal here is to enable AIs to interact economically, which makes viable more decentralized AI architectures (as opposed to non-economic coordination between AIs that are all designed and run by one organization ‘in-house’). Economies not for the sake of economies, but to enable more decentralized authority.”
Developer Exodus, ETH opportunity?
Buterin’s comments came amid a major exodus of crypto blockchain developers to AI projects.
Analytics platform Artemis reported in March 2026 that weekly publishing of new code to crypto repositories had fallen about 75% from early 2025.
Active developers across crypto platforms, including Ethereum, had declined by 56% over the same period.
What is worth noting, however, is that developer migration has a two-fold effect on the ETH to USD price.
While stagnation of builds in Ethereum-native decentralised finance (DeFi) causes short-term dips in price, the exodus simultaneously positions Ethereum as a foundational settlement layer for AI agents, potentially driving higher demand for ETH in the long term.
It is on the latter that Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation are focusing their efforts.
Cypherpunk Mountain Man Vision
The Ethereum Foundation has already set up a dedicated AI group, known as the dAI Team, which will prioritise the enabling of AI agents to coordinate without intermediaries, and building a decentralised AI stack.
A big part of the dAI Team’s focus will to work on Ethereum’s proposed “ERC-8004” standard.
The aim of this standard is to prove whether an AI agent is legitimate and can be trusted.
This ties in well with what Buterin described as the “cypherpunk ‘mountain man’ vision”.
“Basically, take the vision that cypherpunk radicals have always dreamed of (don't trust; verify everything), that has been nonviable in reality because humans are never actually going to verify all the code ourselves. Now, we can finally make that vision happen, with LLMs doing the hard parts.”
Whatever happens with the convergence between crypto and AI, it will be interesting with Ethereum in the mix.