Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

The whole world is talking about AI, and the voices about crypto have quieted down significantly on the timeline.

At the same time, ETH has been stagnant around 2000 for almost two months; it seems that not many people are paying attention to what Vitalik says or does.

However, I recently browsed through his X and found that we are not the only ones influenced by AI. A significant portion of what he has posted in the past month is related to AI, specifically to the level of technical solutions.

The most worth discussing is a proposal he co-published with Davide Crapis, the AI lead at the Ethereum Foundation, on ethresear.ch on February 11, titled "ZK API Usage Credits."

In a nutshell: Use zero-knowledge proofs to allow anonymous calls to large AI models.

Currently, whether you use ChatGPT or call Claude's API, there is only one payment method:

Register an account, bind your email, and bind a credit card.

Every time you have a conversation, every prompt, the platform knows it is you who sent it. What you asked, when you asked, how many times, all tied to your real identity.

Vitalik and Crapis's proposal offers an alternative path.

1. The user deposits a sum into the smart contract, for example, 100 USDC.
2. The contract will register this deposit onto a cryptographic list on the chain. After that, every time you call the API, you do not need to present your identity; you just need to generate a zero-knowledge proof.
3. It can prove two things to the service provider: you are on the list, and your balance is sufficient. But the proof itself does not reveal which one you are on the list.

The service provider can receive payment and prevent abuse, yet they never know who you are.

You can understand this proposal as Vitalik's belief that in the AI era, users should not have to give up their identity to use an AI tool.

This proposal is currently still in the research stage, and there is still a distance from implementation; large model providers may not agree to such a method; at the same time, the proposal's comment section is filled with rebuttals and doubts, suggesting that AI model providers will always find a way to know your true identity.

However, I believe the significance of this proposal does not solely lie in 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 the core technical route of Ethereum, this line has never been broken. It's just that in the past few years, privacy in the crypto industry has always lacked a sufficiently large story to connect it.

AI has filled this story. When you talk to large models more than you talk to anyone, privacy is a real need.

Vitalik Embraces AI

From February to now, a significant portion of what Vitalik has posted on X has been related to AI, with a density that doesn't feel casual.

Yesterday he posted a long thread, stating that he recently attended a cryptography conference, where people were concerned about privacy, about open-source, about anti-censorship... but had no feelings about blockchain.

Among that group of people, he conducted a thought experiment:

Forget "we are the Ethereum community," and think from scratch about where Ethereum is most useful.

His conclusion is that the foundational value of Ethereum is to act as a bulletin board. A place where anyone can write, anyone can read, no one can modify or delete.

In the context of AI, this might be the most important statement Vitalik has made in the last two years.

We are entering an era of generating unlimited cheap content. Text, images, videos, identities; AI can produce these in bulk. When everything can be forged, what becomes scarce?

These questions ultimately point to the same place: a public, permanent, irreversible data layer. And a record that no one can tamper with is exactly what Ethereum does.

In the past two years, the doubts facing Ethereum can be summarized in one question: what do you have that others cannot replace?

Looking back now, Vitalik did not answer this question directly.

However, the Ethereum Foundation has accomplished several low-key things over the past year: formed a privacy team of 50 people, established a privacy research cluster of nearly 50 people, released the Kohaku privacy framework, and specifically appointed an AI lead; in the 2026 roadmap, institutional-level privacy and faster transaction confirmations are prioritized.

Looking back at his intensive output over the past month, it has mostly been discussing the privacy and efficiency issues of Ethereum 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 validation infrastructure will be. Whether Ethereum can seize this demand is another matter, but he has undoubtedly chosen his table to play.

ETH is still stagnant around 2000. Most people still do not pay much attention to what he has been saying recently.

But perhaps in a few years, looking back, the time to pay attention will be right now.