Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in a public speech in Singapore on Oct. 6 that blockchain technology is still far from mature, and that AI is emerging as both its biggest opportunity and its biggest risk. Speaking at the OKX NOW Global Product and Ecosystem Conference, Buterin said modern cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs, is pushing blockchains beyond programmable assets and toward programmable data, where users can prove specific facts without revealing the full underlying information.
He said that capability will matter more as AI systems collect and process personal data at scale. Looking two years ahead, Buterin said Ethereum transactions should become cheaper and more private, while AI will be woven more deeply into onchain applications. In his view, counterparties may be bots, applications may be written by bots, and what people currently call an app may eventually give way to direct onchain interaction between different agents.
AI as the biggest opportunity and the biggest risk
Buterin opened by saying technological progress has not slowed and is nowhere near complete. Over the past five years, he said, several major trends have been accelerating under the influence of AI. The discussion, in his view, can no longer stop at blockchain alone or at the idea of putting programmable value onchain. The more important question is what becomes possible once technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs mature.
He framed that shift with a simple question: what happens if blockchains do not just support programmable assets, but programmable data as well?
From programmable assets to programmable data
Buterin traced that transition back roughly a decade to the development of zero-knowledge proofs. He mentioned Zcash, privacy protocols on Ethereum and ZK rollups, and said the number of people who have actually used those tools may still be small today. Even so, he expects them to mature quickly. Within two years, he said, most people may have used at least one of these technologies, even if they do not realize it.
He described them as modern cryptographic tools that let users prove they know something, or prove that an asset or object satisfies a condition, without disclosing all of the underlying information. A person could prove facts about themselves, an asset or another object without exposing everything behind that proof.
Information disclosure, he said, should not happen automatically. People should not have to reveal everything to everyone just to participate in a system. Each disclosure should be a deliberate choice. In the AI era, he said, that principle becomes more important, not less.
Why privacy becomes more important in the AI era
Buterin said rapid technical progress has delivered many new capabilities, but privacy is often what gets lost. Powerful AI agents can now help people think through problems, he said, but if someone uses Claude to help organize their thinking, Claude also gains access to those thoughts. For some categories of information, that is not acceptable. For others, disclosure may not even be legally permitted.
He cited attorney-client privilege and information covered by confidentiality agreements as examples. In those cases, he said, it is not fully clear whether using many mainstream AI products is lawful.
He also pointed to the spread of data collection in everyday life. A room that might have contained far fewer cameras 10 years ago can now contain thousands, he said, once smartphones, computers and other devices are counted together. Audio recording and the collection of other physical-world signals are expanding at the same time.
AI is also improving attack capability and vulnerability discovery
From a cybersecurity standpoint, Buterin said the challenge of protecting information and assets is growing. This year, he said, AI has started to show a real ability to attack different systems. He referred to AI escaping sandboxes, attacking websites and finding exploitable flaws in software.
At the same time, he noted that Ethereum has not gone down and Bitcoin has not gone down. Higher levels of security are still achievable, and AI is part of the reason. He said AI is already helping the Ethereum protocol find bugs, helping engineers implement very complex cryptography and helping prove mathematically that systems have the properties they are supposed to have.
He added that AI is beginning to assist with formal verification, not only at the protocol layer but also at the application layer, including checks on whether assets are safe, whether data remains private and whether other security conditions hold.
His conclusion was blunt: security standards that once looked out of reach are becoming possible, but they are also becoming mandatory. If a system has a vulnerability, AI will find it. As he put it, 「GPT-7 will find it, Claude 7 will find it, DeepSeek 7 will find it. They will all find it.」
AI will become the new user interface
Buterin said that about a month ago, he updated his ENS for the first time without using a traditional interface at all. Instead, he asked a locally running AI agent to write a script that updated his ENS hash. The process took the AI about five minutes.
He said he expects that pattern to become normal. In the future, users may be able to complete complex blockchain operations without touching a conventional UI. More and more often, he said, AI will become the new UI.
That change brings benefits, but it also creates risk. As one example, he referred to the Safe attack. Safe, he said, was one of the largest crypto wallets, and the incident resulted in losses of about $1.4 billion. The attack did not target the smart contract or the code onchain. It targeted the layer between the blockchain and the user.
If more transactions are executed directly by AI in the future, that layer may start to disappear. Some of the risks tied to traditional front ends may shrink with it. He pointed to questions such as whether the interface itself is secure, whether the front end downloaded each time a user opens a webpage is secure, and whether attackers, including North Korean hackers, could compromise that front end at the moment of access and steal funds.
Some old problems may fade, but new ones will appear
Buterin said AI introduces its own set of problems. The first issue is whether the AI itself is secure. Can it be hit by prompt injection? Does it actually understand what operation it is carrying out on a blockchain?
In his view, some existing problems will be reduced, but a new batch of challenges will arrive at the same time. For developers, application builders and everyone else in the ecosystem, that means opportunity, but it also means rethinking every layer of interaction with these systems.
He argued that the issues now appearing in blockchain are not unique to blockchain. The broader internet will run into the same problems eventually. Crypto sees them first, he said, for a simple reason: there is a lot of money in blockchain. Attacks that are difficult today may become easy tomorrow, which is why the sector is acting as the front line.
What Ethereum may look like in two years
Buterin said most of these changes are still concentrated in the digital world, while the physical world is moving more slowly. Even so, the physical world is being digitized as well. Twenty years ago, he said, a room might have had 10 cameras. Today it may have thousands. Ten years from now, it may also have five to 10 drones flying around inside it.
That means the physical world is becoming part of the same security discussion. He said the industry has to keep protocols secure and infrastructure stable without standing still. It also has to stay alert and account for every new change, including how those changes affect cybersecurity, individual account security and other parts of the stack.
Asked what Ethereum may offer in two years, Buterin said users should be able to make many transactions at much lower cost than today, with stronger privacy than today. Applications will not be limited to payments for their own sake. More of them will involve interaction with AI.
He said some applications already help users pay for AI inference and improve privacy around those payments. Over time, he expects applications in which AI itself participates directly.
When counterparties, apps and developers are all bots
Buterin said a user’s counterparty in a transaction is already likely to be a bot, and that trend should only become more common. Today, the counterparty may be a bot while the application is still written by a human. Two years from now, he said, the application itself may be written by a bot.
He pushed the idea further. In two years, what people currently think of as an application may not exist in the same form at all. Instead, different bots may continuously publish quotes onchain, while a user’s own bot interprets those quotes, explains what they mean and decides which ones are worth accepting.
He said the implications go beyond finance. The safety of personal data depends not only on the operating system, but also on the AI processing that data and on the hardware underneath it. As the physical world becomes more digital, the security of the physical world itself has to be part of the conversation.
From 「Not your keys」 to 「Not your silicon」
Near the end of the speech, Buterin extended the security boundary all the way down to hardware. Some people use SI to mean superintelligence, he said, but another SI matters just as much: silicon, element 14 on the periodic table, the material that underpins modern hardware.
For years, the industry has repeated the phrase 「Not your keys, not your coins.」 In the future, he said, that line may become 「Not your silicon, not your keys.」
His point was that a system cannot be truly secure unless the hardware carrying that system, and the hardware connecting its outputs to the real world, is secure as well.
Why blockchain remains at the front line of security and privacy
Buterin said everything the industry builds has to be viewed as one complete technology stack. That means thinking upward to the user, leftward to the blockchain, rightward to the internet and downward to hardware.
He said this is one reason blockchain remains at the front line. Hardware wallets used today, in his view, may become more general-purpose security devices in the future.
He closed by saying the path ahead will remain challenging, meaningful and interesting. Blockchain will stay at the front edge of these issues because they are problems the whole world will eventually have to face, and crypto may have to solve many of them first.
He said he hopes people keep thinking about both sides of new technology: the threats it creates and the opportunities it opens. The goal, he said, is not only to improve blockchain itself, but also to show what security, privacy, efficiency and fairness could look like across computing as a whole.