The new Ethereum Foundation initiative aims to standardize AI-agent protocols and build a decentralized AI stack for long-term use
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The Ethereum Foundation has launched a dedicated artificial intelligence initiative, underscoring its view that AI will become central to the network’s future.
The new dAI team, led by Ethereum developer Davide Crapis, was announced with a mission to make Ethereum the preferred settlement and coordination layer for AI agents.
According to Crapis, the initiative aims to bridge blockchain and AI development by advancing standards for how autonomous agents discover, verify and transact with one another.
A near-term priority is the advancement of ERC-8004, a proposed standard for AI-agent identity and interoperability. He also compared Ethereum’s AI opportunity to the early days of DeFi, suggesting grassroots adoption could precede eventual institutional integration, as originally reported by Decrypt.
Longer term, the dAI team is pursuing a decentralized AI stack designed to provide open, verifiable and censorship-resistant alternatives to corporate-controlled systems. Crapis described this as a critical safeguard to prevent AI infrastructure from consolidating under a few powerful actors.
This move comes amid a surge of AI-related experimentation across Web3, with projects on networks like Solana, Avalanche and Polygon also exploring ways to integrate AI agents, decentralized compute and data-sharing protocols.
From tokenized AI marketplaces to autonomous trading bots, developers are increasingly treating blockchains as neutral infrastructure for machine-to-machine coordination.
This is a developing story.
This article was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by editor Jeffrey Albus before publication.
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