Author: Deep Tide TechFlow
The whole world is talking about AI, and the crypto space seems to have quieted down a bit.
Meanwhile, ETH has been hovering around 2000 for almost two months. What Vitalik says or does doesn’t seem to attract much attention anymore.
But I recently checked his X and found that it’s not just us who are affected by AI. Over the past month, a large part of what he posted has been related to AI, and it’s gotten down to the level of technical proposals.
Among them, the most noteworthy is a proposal he co-authored with Davide Crapis, the AI lead at the Ethereum Foundation, published on ethresear.ch on February 11th, titled "ZK API Usage Credits".
In a nutshell: Using zero-knowledge proofs to let you anonymously call AI large models.
Right now, whether you use ChatGPT or call Claude’s API, there’s only one way to pay:
Register an account, bind an email, bind a credit card.
Every conversation you have, every prompt you send, the platform knows it’s from you. What you asked, when you asked it, how many times you asked—all are tied to your real identity.
Vitalik and Crapis’s proposal offers another path.
- The user deposits a sum of money into a smart contract, say 100 USDC.
- The contract registers this deposit into an encrypted list on-chain. Afterwards, each time you call the API, you don’t need to reveal your identity; you just need to generate a zero-knowledge proof.
- This proof can demonstrate two things to the service provider: You are on the list, and your balance is sufficient. But the proof itself does not reveal which specific entry on the list you are.
The service provider gets paid and can prevent abuse, but never knows who you are.
You can understand this proposal as one thing: Vitalik believes that in the AI era, users should not have to surrender their identity just to use an AI tool.
This proposal is currently still in the research stage, far from implementation, and large model manufacturers might not agree to such a method; meanwhile, the comment section of the proposal is full of rebuttals and质疑, arguing that AI model companies will always find a way to know your real identity.
But the author believes the significance of this proposal is not entirely about whether it can be implemented itself.
Privacy is something Vitalik has been working on for a decade. From early support for Tornado Cash, to promoting zero-knowledge proofs as a core technical路线 for Ethereum, this thread has never been broken. It’s just that in the past few years, privacy has been missing a big enough story to carry it in the context of the crypto industry.
AI has filled that story. When you talk to large models more than anyone else every day, privacy is a real demand.
Vitalik Embraces AI
From February until now, a significant portion of what Vitalik has posted on X has been related to AI, with a density that suggests it’s not just casual chat.
Yesterday he posted a long thread, saying he recently attended a cryptography conference where people cared about privacy, cared about open source, cared about censorship resistance... but had no affection for blockchain whatsoever.
Among that crowd, he conducted a thought experiment:
Forget "we are the Ethereum community," start from scratch and think about where Ethereum is most useful.
His conclusion is that Ethereum’s most fundamental value is as a bulletin board. A place where anyone can write, anyone can read, and no one can change or delete anything.
In the context of AI, this might be the most important thing Vitalik has said in the past two years.
We are entering an era of infinitely cheap generation. Text, images, videos, identities—AI can mass-produce them all. When everything can be forged, what becomes scarce?
These questions ultimately point to the same place: a public, persistent, irreversible data layer. And a record that no one can tamper with is exactly what Ethereum can do.
Over the past two years, the质疑 facing Ethereum can be summed up in one sentence: What exactly do you have left that others can’t replace?
Looking at it now, Vitalik hasn’t answered this question directly.
However, the Ethereum Foundation has done a few inconspicuous things over the past year: formed a 50-person privacy team, established a nearly 50-person privacy research cluster, released the Kohaku privacy framework, specifically appointed an AI lead; in the 2026 roadmap, institutional-grade privacy and faster transaction confirmation are listed as top priorities.
Looking back at his密集 output this past month, it has mostly been discussing Ethereum’s privacy and efficiency issues in the context of AI.
I think Vitalik is betting on one thing: the more powerful AI becomes, the more rigid the demand for privacy and verification infrastructure will be. Whether Ethereum can catch this demand is another matter, but he has clearly chosen his table.
ETH is still hovering around 2000. Most people still don’t pay much attention to what he’s been saying lately.
But perhaps looking back in a few years, now is the time we should have been paying attention.
