Everyone is talking about AI, and the voices about crypto on the timeline have become much quieter. At the same time, ETH has been hovering around 2000 for almost two months, and it seems that not many people care about what Vitalik says or does. However, I recently looked through his X and found that it’s not just us who are affected by AI. In the past month, a large part of what he has posted is related to AI, and it is specific to the level of technical solutions.

The most noteworthy of these is a proposal jointly published by him and the Ethereum Foundation’s AI lead, Davide Crapis, on ethresear.ch on February 11, called “ZK API Usage Credits.” In a nutshell, it means: using zero-knowledge proofs to allow you to anonymously call AI large models.

Whether you use ChatGPT now or call Claude’s API, there is only one way to pay: register an account, bind an email, and bind a credit card. Every conversation and every prompt you make is known to the platform. What you ask, when you ask, and how many times you ask are all tied to your real identity.

Vitalik and Crapis’ proposal offers another way: 1. The user deposits money into a smart contract, such as 100 USDC. 2. The contract registers this deposit in an on-chain encrypted list. After each API call, you do not need to show your identity, you only 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 money and prevent abuse, but never knows who you are.

You can understand this proposal as one thing, that Vitalik believes that in the AI era, users should not have to give up their identity in order to use an AI tool. This proposal is still in the research stage and is still far from being implemented. Large model manufacturers may not agree to such a method; at the same time, the comment section of the proposal is also full of rebuttals and questions, believing that AI model factories will always find a way to know your real identity. However, I think that the significance of this proposal does not lie entirely in whether it can be implemented.

Privacy is something Vitalik has been doing for ten years. 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 context of the crypto industry has been lacking a big enough story to carry it. AI has filled this story. When you talk to large models more than you talk to anyone else every day, privacy is a real need.

From February to now, a considerable part of what Vitalik has posted on X is related to AI, with a density so high that it doesn’t seem like just casual talk. Yesterday, he posted a long post saying that he recently went to a cryptography conference, where people cared about privacy, open source, and anti-censorship… but had no feelings for blockchain. Among those people, he did a thought experiment: forget “we are the Ethereum community”, and think from scratch, where is Ethereum most useful? His conclusion is that the most fundamental value of Ethereum is as a bulletin board. A place where anyone can write, anyone can read, no one can change, and no one can delete.

In the context of AI, this may be the most important sentence Vitalik has said in the past two years. We are entering an era of generating infinitely cheap things. AI can create text, images, videos, and identities in batches. When everything can be faked, what will become scarce? These questions will eventually point to the same place: a public, persistent, and irreversible data layer. And a record that no one can tamper with is exactly what Ethereum can do.

In the past two years, the question Ethereum has faced can be summed up in one sentence: What do you have that others can’t replace? Now, Vitalik has not answered this question directly. However, the Ethereum Foundation has done a few inconspicuous things in the past year: formed a 50-person privacy team, established a privacy research cluster of nearly 50 people, released the Kohaku privacy framework, and specifically set up an AI head; in the 2026 roadmap, institutional-level privacy and faster transaction confirmation are listed as the top priorities.

Looking back at his intensive output this month, it is basically 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 is, the more rigid the demand for privacy and verification infrastructure will be. Whether Ethereum can take this demand is another matter, but he has obviously chosen the poker table. ETH is still hovering around 2000. Most people still don’t pay much attention to what he has been saying recently. But maybe looking back in a few years, what should be paid attention to is this period of time.

[深潮TechFlow]