Hello Vitalik. Thanks for visiting us. Today's interview will primarily focus on the long-term trends and the fundamentals at the intersections of AI and cryptos. So, it's totally forward-looking and idea-driven. My first question is regarding the on-chain OS. If blockchain is an on-chain operating system, what essential primitives must it provide for the agent era? Especially, what is missing from Ethereum today?
So, I see Ethereum providing like two big functionalities for applications. Right, one of them is the public billboard. It's a place where anyone can post data on-chain and then applications can interpret that data in many different ways. And then the other is the on-chain computation. And on-chain computation includes a lot of financial applications, includes other applications, includes DeFi, includes many other things. I think with AI it's fundamentally the same use case as well. It can continue to be important. I think AI will definitely make the way that we interact with the blockchain and with other tools that we have very different. Like there's many differences, but one of them is that in a pre-blockchain world as a user you're interacting through one interface and then that one interface is like an interface to one thing. And with AI, as it exists right now and probably the next few years, what we're seeing is that we're seeing tools and then you have skills and then you can have like a user-side AI that can use these different skills and it can just do things that combine like interacting with many different things at the same time. Intuitively like that should increase the amount of workflows that we see that interact with Ethereum and also interact with other kinds of things. And so I think to me, you know, like the operating system is like almost the wrong metaphor in some ways, right? Like I think the operating system will continue to exist, but like it will be smaller, it will be more simple. And then we will just have a collection of like different tools, different skills that like AI will help people like use and do things with. And blockchain to me is like the most natural way to allow like applications to happen that allow cooperation between many different people and that kind of work in the long term and work without needing to like agree on like who to trust. And then the other thing is also the economical layer, right? This is the layer where like blockchains can support AIs, right? Because like there's this difference of like can you have more decentralized AI and more centralized AI? And if you have more decentralized AI, that means you have the like different AI things like agents, programs, whatever you call it that are built by different people that are controlled by different people that needs to interact with each other. And for that interaction to be possible you need to have an economical layer, right? Because either cooperation is based on like economic incentives, economic rules, rewards, and like penalties, or it's based on central control. And so usually one of the two, right? And if we can set up the economic system, then like that makes more decentralized interaction between AI possible.
Exactly. As an operating system, we have runtime, we have software built on top of it. Just as you mentioned, like for this whole new world of agent e-commerce, we need a final way to find agents, define appropriate agents to meet people's specific needs. Yeah. And user agents could also get involved to interact together. They can build their own skills, MCPs, CIs. My next question is regarding users. As you know, when agents can autonomously transact, hold assets, or even vote for those, how should we redefine the users? Especially from Ethereum governance perspective, how do you think to redefine for the non-human participants?
I mean, I personally like I still think of people as being the users. And I think of AI as like being the replacement for UI. Like it's the new ways through which like people can interact with the chain. And so like if you think about like for example, if you use the internet to like learn about something, right? And then if before AI, then you might search for it on Google, you would access the page on Wikipedia. If it's technical, like maybe search Stack Overflow. But then with AI, it's like a very different workflow, right? Like you ask a question to you know, the bot, and then the bot does things, and it answers. And like I think, you know, we're going to see similar kinds of changes, right? And this does like mean big changes in terms of what properties we want the blockchain to have. So, like for example, one of them is latency, right? Like when a human is interacting directly, like often low latency is very important, right? And I think with agents like there are some situations where low latency is good and like actually you want even lower latency. Like if an AI can think a thousand times faster than a human, then like there is benefits in pushing it down to 1 millisecond. But also other situations where latency actually does not matter. And like because if you think about like for example, when you ask Claude like something or GPT or DeepSeek or anything, like a complicated question. What it does is it thinks, it makes internet searches, it gets responses. Like basically you ask the question, then you go get a cup of coffee and then you come back. And so it's like actually okay if the latency is a 1 minute. And so like we're going to see both, right? So like this is a big change in you know, like how we need to think about like even the chain. How we think about the interface layer will change a lot. And like if we look at the wallet for example, right? Like the piece that I think will stay the same is the SDK, like the core software that is just it's like an API layer like in as a function. Send coins, you know, tell me my balance, like do something privately. And but then everything around it like maybe you know, like we don't need a wallet, right? Like you just need you know, you talk to the SDK, right? What we're going to have is we're going to have these like different packages of software that's like people work hard on them, make sure they're secure, make sure they're formally verified and you have like a skill file and then they're designed so that no matter how you use them, like you have a strong assurance that it's secure. And then like AI works around that, right? So, yeah, I think at the layer kind of in between the chain and you know, like the user, we're going to see very large changes.
Regarding these scenarios, we imagine the actual entity behind the real transaction to be a human being or AI agent, a hybrid of both. How should we rethink the on-chain identity in this scenario?
Yeah, I think it's always good to try to like decompose identity as much as possible and understand like what are the claims about yourself that you actually need to prove to me to do one particular interaction. Like I think for most interactions, it actually does not make sense to fully reveal who you are. I think in most cases it makes sense to reveal like some things about who you are. And like you can make zero knowledge proofs about your reputation, you can make zero knowledge proofs about like the source of your funds, you can make zero knowledge proofs about all kinds of things. And I think it makes sense to like figure out some framework that makes it easy to do these kinds of things. And like making it easy to zero knowledge proof things about Ethereum, about like things that people have, making it easier for wallets to help people store private information. And then we also want to figure out like for different applications, like what is a version of this that like actually satisfies the needs of the application and then at the same time protects the user's information as much as possible.
Yes. I have a follow-up question. In your perspective, is it possible to make a system or framework or abstraction that is friendly or appropriate to both human factors or agent or we should do something particular for agent scenario?
No, I think it's fine to continue to build on top of the same framework. Let's say like agents themselves can like figure out you know like what things they need to do on L1, what things they need to do in different kinds of L2s. And at least right now, I know the reasoning that they're using is not that different from like the reasoning that people are using. And I expect that you know the market will figure out you know the right distribution of tasks to these different platforms.
Sounds good. And there's another question about like public goods mechanism in the agentic economy world. If the agents become the major on-chain economy actors, how should the protocol level public goods mechanism evolve for these non-human capital flows?
Yeah, this is tricky because figuring out how to fund public goods is a governance problem and to have governance you need to have a theory of who the stakeholders are. And you know I think there's still stakeholders, right? Like for every agent there's people who are running those agents who have who had some reason to run them. I think like AI and ZK both open up many more possibilities for how that kind of governance can run. And then at the same time I think you know AI does break a lot of the previous mechanisms because basically a lot of things that used to require a lot of high amounts of effort to break, you know we can break them automatically. And that's something that we will just have to like keep figuring out, keep iterating over time.
