Ethereum Is for AI | David Crapis - Ethereum Foundation

Is this on? You guys hear me? Okay, great. All right, so who's ready for our next speaker? We're going to be talking about the um the theme that is just sweeping the whole ecosystem with um David Kra who runs our decentralized AI team DI and his talk is going to be Ethereum for AI.

So let's give him a round of applause.

Thank you. Hi, I'm going to talk about uh Ethereum for AI. So, first what's the vision of Ethereum and AI? Um, Ethereum is going to be the decentralized settlement and coordination backbone uh for machines in the machine economy with humans at the center. So, I think this part is very important.

Uh you'll see throughout my talk that um we have kind of two pillars. We want machines to use Ethereum but we want to keep humans at the center with their sovereignty and also like uh governance and keep power in the age of AI. So Ethereum for AI really means Ethereum for humans here and uh as I said like we want human to have agency ownership and control in this age. So why now um like essentially like we want Ethereum to be this settlement layer but uh it's only as valuable as the amount of economic activity that settles on it and um AI is proliferating around the world we are using it more and more everyone in society is using it more and more so like um if we don't build for like this uh new like uh technology um then we risk reduce relevance in this world right and why now so this is funny I'm um quoting like a blog post that I wrote actually in March 2024. Yeah, it's almost two years ago.

Um and uh it was called like the internet of agents, right? Like I was talking about like how bots are going to transact with one another and like back then it seemed futuristic, right? Uh but if you fast forward to today uh we have like ERCA 2004 live on Ethereum and then the same week we had the open claw uh kind of um madness. Uh so people are seeing that like this future is not actually that far and like uh these bots are already demanding block space. So as I said we have two pillars.

One is like decentralized coordination. What does it mean? We want to use uh the blockchain like for discovery and trust. Uh we want to like add like privacy anonymity to API calls. Uh we want to facilitate bots iring bots uh staking new security model negotiations, smart contract commitments uh and uh other like uh financial primitives.

And then finally we can have Dows right like uh we can have like uh small groups of swarms of agents that organize and we can keep governing them. The other area is uh uh crops AI. This is like censorship resistant, open source, private and secure AI. Uh this is something that the mainstream uh AI uh is not working on. Uh and this is very aligned with like the values we have for uh Ethereum, right?

So we kind of uh want to both like bring AI to like enhance crops in Ethereum and then also like uh build the tools for like uh uh a more like user empowering AI stack, right? And this is local AI is like uh using AI for like uh improving Ethereum UX of wallets. Um but also like uh actually using AI to like uh make the protocol better and more secure, right? So we have some projects and some RFS on AI security auditors, protocol research agents, better governance tooling. Uh and then this is a bit futuristic but there is already some PC's in the market of like decentralized AI compute training and markets like that.

So how are we making Ethereum the best platform for AI? So at the EF we have a dedicated AI team which I lead uh which collaborates with like uh uh the privacy teams, the security teams and the ecosystem teams. Um uh and then uh there is recently there's been like a lot of alignment on the AI road map of our of our team which is very exciting and then in the ecosystem like through uh ERC804 which I will show like we are engaging all the best projects um we are collaborating with Austin and the build builder engagement inside the EF uh to bring like new young uh students builders in the ecosystem. Um and then uh we are also working with leading uh AI organizations and researchers and uh you'll see uh uh more um uh works come out uh from our team this year on this. So here I'm showing um uh kind of a diagram in Vitalic style of uh the protocol road map of our team.

Uh so there is two areas uh one is AI coordination. We have uh ERC 2004 identity and reputation registry which is live on ethereum mainet and on many other chains and then uh we have a few projects one is on uh X42 trustless discovery and then a lot of like uh layer 2 infra for 804 uh that people are building on the privacy and security uh we have like a new Testation standard that we'll use in uh 804 validation which will go live uh in a couple of months. And then uh we have this new project on ZKLM credits that we started working together with people from the PSC team at the EF and also some external contributors. Um and then there is a few other projects which are more security focused and UX focused. So just a snapshot on what's happening with um ERC804 today like uh it's live on uh 20 plus chains.

Uh there is hundreds of projects that are building on it like many of them are building infrastructure but there is already like uh uh between 50 and 100 uh agents which are very useful. Uh there is like thousands of active builders. We have like uh four scanners that focus on different part of like this new like uh bot economy. Uh there is a very interesting uh project that just came out last week. It's called Siwa sign in with agent.

It's kind of a variation on sign in with Ethereum that leverages um the ERCA 2004 uh registries. Uh there is obviously all the work that um Austin has been doing with like uh um its skills.mmd like uh including like 804 between the standards supported. I put the um mascot of Austin's um clag bot and then you cannot see very well but like I was showing like a few of the APIs a few of uh the agent services that are are available on uh 804. We're also uh working with engaging like uh universities and especially AI researchers.

Um here like we put out two RFP like together with um Sham Theo and the academic secretariat at the AF. Um one is about AI uh powered uh protocol security both like uh design of specs and auditing. Uh and the other one is uh on like something that I'm very excited about is essentially like using smart contract to um uh um uh do automated negotiation and um mechanism design between bots. I feel that like this will be actually like a big application uh on the chain going forward as this agent commerce uh takes off. So then there is also collaboration between like uh the privacy team.

As I said we have this new uh proposal that is out. We are actually uh already implementing PC's. We have one out and um we are also looking to collaborate uh with um um like vendors both both LLM APIs but also RPCs and other type of APIs that are interested in deploying u like a private payment solution. So reach out to me directly uh if you are uh interested in collaborating or you can check the uh ETH research um uh spec. Yeah.

And finally like uh how are we doing all this? uh we have the DI team uh at the EF but we also have like um the 804 team which is made uh from people with people from the EF as well as from like uh other projects in the ecosystem um plus many many other contributors. So this is kind of like a shared effort. There is more people building in AI on Ethereum. there is more people excited about AI and uh we kind of want to work with uh everyone and trying to coordinate and uh make Ethereum as I said like the best settlement layer uh for this new um technology.

Yep. And with that I'm done. I'm leaving a few uh uh links. One is 804.org.

That's where you can see uh everything that is happening and you can also join the group. And then AI.thereum.foundation is where we publish like all our research and all the updates for the broader AI uh team efforts. And uh you can find me at David Kravis on all the main socials and like messaging uh if you need to reach out directly.

Thank you.