Ethereum Foundation Launches AI Team, Underscoring Network’s Future Priorities

The Ethereum Foundation is launching a full-time team dead set on the network’s latest priority: becoming not just the bedrock of the AI economy, but also of AI software development at large.

The dAI team, named in a nod to Ethereum’s longstanding principles of decentralization and democracy, will focus its efforts both on fostering the development of AI systems within the crypto ecosystem and on bringing top players in the off-chain AI industry onto the network.

“We want to bridge the gap between blockchain organizations and AI organizations,” Davide Crapis, an Ethereum core developer who will lead the dAI team, told Decrypt. 

The team will initially feature two other full-time roles, which the Ethereum Foundation is currently hiring for.

Crapis said the Ethereum Foundation’s investment in a full-time AI operation shows the organization's acknowledgement that the sector will be “key” to its long-term sustainability. 

“We are realizing that AI is going to be a big part of the lives of all humans,” he said. “And it's going to be a large part of Ethereum usage in the future.”

In the near-term, the team will focus on implementing proposals like ERC-8004, which would create a standard for AI agents to seamlessly discover, verify, and transact with each other across the Ethereum ecosystem. 

That proposal, which Ethereum developers hope will cement the network as the de-facto settlement layer for the exploding AI agent economy, is still being finalized. It will be presented in its final form at Devconnect, an Ethereum developer conference to be held in Buenos Aires in November.

Looking ahead to the future, Crapis said his team will be focused on the even larger goal of establishing a decentralized AI stack designed to “make sure the future of AI is not in the hands of a few very powerful corporations.”

That doesn’t mean Ethereum necessarily intends on going to war with OpenAI, though. Crapis says he sees AI as Ethereum’s next DeFi opportunity—one that, after years of grassroots adoption, eventually attracts even once-hesitant centralized institutions.

“The focus needs to be on building the best decentralized technology we can offer,” the developer said. 

“Ethereum’s infrastructure has so far been focused mostly on finance,” he continued. “It needs to be very usable for AI as well.”

Already, the Ethereum Foundation’s dAI team is engaged in research collaborations with major Silicon Valley companies, which Crapis said will be announced in due time.