Vitalik Buterin touts Ethereum as near-future economic layer for AGI interactions

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared updated views on the Ethereum-AGI convergence, suggesting the ecosystem can soon enable AIs to interact economically. Buterin says the goal is to build more viable decentralized AI infrastructures to enable more decentralized authority under the ERC-8004 standard.

In what he describes as only one piece of the bigger Ethereum puzzle, Buterin emphasizes that the ecosystem can help AIs interact economically in the near future. As an economic layer for AI-related interactions, Ethereum can enable decentralized authorization for API calls, bot-to-bot hiring, and security deposits (including on-chain dispute resolution). Buterin believes in building tooling to make interactions between AI agents as trustless and/or private as possible.

According to the Ethereum boss, this can be achieved in the short term through local LLM tooling and zero-knowledge (ZK) payment for API calls, so that remote models can be called without the need to link identities from call to call. Buterin also believes the industry should focus on ongoing work in cryptographic approaches to improve AI privacy, client-side verification of cryptographic proofs, TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) attestations, and other forms of server-side assurances. 

Buterin views Ethereum and AGI frameworks as philosophically alike 

According to the Ethereum co-founder, the Ethereum-AGI intersection is a topic that many people are excited about, but they think about the two from completely separate philosophical perspectives. He notes that our civilization should approach Ethereum and AGI in the same way, choosing a positive direction rather than embracing undifferentiated acceleration of both. Buterin thinks it is actually essential to integrate the AI and crypto perspectives.

However, the Ethereum executive previously noted a particular challenge in securing both AI and crypto. In crypto, Buterin emphasized that open source is the only way to build truly secure systems. Meanwhile, an “open” AI model (or its training data) greatly increases its vulnerability to malicious machine learning attacks. 

Buterin rejects Solana’s Anatoly’s narrow AGI focus 

In a long X post, the Ethereum boss responded to Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko (“Toly”), rejecting what he calls Toly’s narrow focus on AGI. According to Buterin, Toly’s perception of AGI is similar to reducing Ethereum to just “working in finance” or “working on computing.”  

The Ethereum co-founder also emphasizes human empowerment, safety from superintelligent threats, and practical steps like revitalized markets and governance structures. He also notes that while skeptics see the AGI vision as a shift from past Ethereum narratives, builders are praising the move towards self-sustaining AI agents. Meanwhile, Hyperbolic Labs’ co-founder and CTO, Yuchen Jin, believes that “self-improvement” or thinking that “AGI is near” remains an illusion without continual learning.

In support of Jin’s sentiments, OpenAI’s Sam Altman recently said that reaching true AGI will not take one big step but rather many medium-term breakthroughs, according to Cryptopolitan. However, while he believes that achieving AGI is very close, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella disagrees. Satya noted that reaching true AGI is nowhere close, adding that it is not just about him or Sam declaring it; it is the reality.

In the meantime, Buterin notes that LLMs can overcome the limitations of all these “beautiful” theories. He also argues that while prediction and decision markets, decentralized governance, combinatorial auctions, quadratic voting, and a universal barter economy have all been greatly limited by constraints on human attention and decision-making power, LLMs can massively scale human judgment.  

Additionally, Buterin claims that the Ethereum network can make all this a reality if his best ideas from 2014 are revisited. He believes that many more new and better ideas can be added to his initial views, and that AI and ZK technologies can provide a whole new set of tools to bring those ideas to life.