Author: Deep Tide TechFlow
Original Title: Vitalik Wrote a Proposal Teaching You How to Stealthily Use AI Large Models
Everyone is talking about AI, and the crypto space seems much quieter on the timeline.
Meanwhile, ETH has been hovering around 2000 for almost two months. What Vitalik says or does doesn't seem to attract much attention anymore.
However, I recently checked his X (Twitter) and found that AI has influenced more than just us. Over the past month, a significant portion of his posts have been about AI, and they've even reached the level of technical proposals.
Among them, the most noteworthy is a proposal 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, it's about 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 tied to your real identity.
Vitalik and Crapis's proposal offers another path.
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The user deposits a sum of money into a smart contract, say 100 USDC.
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The contract registers this deposit into an encrypted on-chain list. After that, every time you call the API, you don't need to reveal your identity; you just generate a zero-knowledge proof.
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This proof does two things for the service provider: it proves you're on the list, and it proves your balance is sufficient. But the proof itself doesn't 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 interpret this proposal as Vitalik believing that in the AI era, users shouldn't have to surrender their identity just to use an AI tool.
This proposal is still in the research phase, far from implementation, and large model manufacturers might not agree to such a method. The comments section of the proposal is also full of rebuttals and skepticism, arguing that AI model companies will always find a way to know your real identity.
But the author believes the significance of this proposal isn't entirely about whether it can be implemented.
Privacy is something Vitalik has worked on for a decade. From early support for Tornado Cash to promoting zero-knowledge proofs as a core technical roadmap for Ethereum, this thread has never been broken. It's just that in the past few years, privacy in the crypto industry's narrative lacked a big enough story to carry it.
AI has filled that story. When you talk to a large model more than anyone else every day, privacy becomes 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 more than 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.
Among that crowd, he conducted a thought experiment:
Forget "we are the Ethereum community," start from scratch and think about where Ethereum is actually 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 last couple of 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 an unchangeable record is exactly what Ethereum can provide.
Over the past two years, the skepticism Ethereum has faced can be summed up in one sentence: What do you still have that others can't replace?
Looking at it now, Vitalik hasn't answered that question directly.
However, the Ethereum Foundation has done a few low-key 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; the 2026 roadmap lists institutional-grade privacy and faster transaction confirmation as top priorities.
Looking back at his intensive output this month, it's mostly been discussions about 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 meet this demand is another matter, but he has clearly chosen his table.
ETH is still hovering around 2000. Most people still aren't paying much attention to what he's been saying lately.
But perhaps in a few years, looking back, this might be the time we should have been paying attention.
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