Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in Singapore on Oct. 6 that technology is nowhere near finished and blockchain is still far from mature, arguing that AI now represents both the biggest opportunity and the biggest risk for the industry.
Speaking at the OKX NOW Global Product and Ecosystem Conference, Buterin said the next phase of blockchain development will not stop at “programmable assets.” With zero-knowledge proofs and other modern cryptographic tools maturing, he said, blockchains can also move toward “programmable data,” allowing users to prove specific facts without disclosing the full underlying information.
From programmable assets to programmable data
Buterin traced that shift back roughly 10 years to the development of zero-knowledge proofs. He referenced Zcash, privacy protocols on Ethereum, and ZK rollups, saying these tools may still be used directly by a minority today but could mature quickly.
He said it is quite possible that within two years, most people will have used at least one of those technologies in some form, even if they do not realize it.
In his description, these cryptographic systems let users prove that they know something, or that a fact about themselves, an asset, or an object is true and satisfies a condition they care about, without exposing all the raw information. Information disclosure, he said, should not happen automatically. People should not need to reveal everything to everyone just to take part in a system, and every disclosure should be a conscious choice.
That issue becomes more important in the AI era, he said.
Why privacy matters more in the AI era
Buterin said rapid technological progress brings many new capabilities, but privacy is often what gets lost. He pointed to the rise of powerful AI agents that can help users think through problems. If someone uses Claude to help with that process, he said, Claude also gains access to those thoughts.
For some information, that may simply be undesirable. For other information, he said, disclosure may not even be legally permitted, citing attorney-client privilege and information covered by confidentiality agreements. In those cases, he said, it is not always fully clear whether using many mainstream AI products is lawful.
He expanded the point beyond software and into the physical environment. Looking around a room, he said, there are now far more cameras than there would have been 10 years ago. Phones that once had one camera now have three, and with laptops and other devices in the same space, a single room may contain thousands of cameras, along with voice recording and other forms of environmental data collection.
For Buterin, that is only one side of the data-collection trend, which he said is moving into every corner of daily life at high speed.
AI is improving attacks and defenses at the same time
From a cybersecurity perspective, Buterin said the industry also has to think about protecting information and assets. He said this year has already shown that AI is beginning to acquire real offensive capability across different systems, including escaping sandboxes, attacking websites, and finding exploitable bugs in software.
At the same time, he noted that the Ethereum blockchain has not gone down, and neither has Bitcoin. Higher levels of security, he said, will become possible, and AI itself is a large part of the reason why.
He said AI is already helping the Ethereum protocol find vulnerabilities, helping teams implement very complex cryptography, and helping prove mathematically that systems have the properties they are supposed to have. AI is also starting to assist with formal verification not only at the protocol layer, but at the application layer as well, including checks on whether assets are safe, whether data has privacy protection, and other security conditions.
In his view, standards that were previously out of reach will gradually become achievable. They will also become mandatory, because if a system has a weakness, 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 as the next 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 whole process, he said, took the AI about five minutes.
He expects that pattern to become normal. In the future, he said, people will be able to complete complicated blockchain actions without touching a traditional UI, and AI will increasingly become the new interface.
That could remove some existing risks. Buterin pointed to the Safe attack, describing it as one of the largest crypto wallets and saying the incident ultimately led to about $1.4 billion in losses. The attack, he said, did not target the smart contract or onchain code itself. It targeted the layer between the blockchain and the user.
If more transactions are executed directly by AI, that layer may start to disappear, reducing some of the problems tied to conventional front ends. He specifically mentioned questions such as whether the UI itself is secure, whether the front end that gets downloaded each time a user opens a website is safe, and whether an attacker who compromises that layer at the moment of access can steal funds.
Some risks decline, new ones appear
Buterin said AI will bring its own set of problems. The first question is whether the AI itself is secure, whether it can be hit by prompt injection, and whether it truly understands the blockchain action it is carrying out.
Some old problems may be reduced, he said, but a new batch of challenges will arrive at the same time. For the people building these systems and applications, and for everyone participating in the ecosystem, that means both major opportunity and a need to rethink every layer of interaction.
He added that these are not problems unique to blockchains. The wider internet will face them too. Blockchain systems will just run into them earlier, in his telling, because there is a lot of money in crypto.
Attacks that are difficult today may become easy tomorrow, he said, making blockchain the front line of that transition.
What Ethereum could look like in two years
Looking ahead, Buterin said these changes are still centered mainly in the digital world, though the physical world is digitizing as well. He again used cameras as an example: a room might have had 10 cameras 20 years ago, could have thousands today, and might have five to 10 drones flying around it 10 years from now.
In that environment, he said, the industry has to keep protocols secure and infrastructure stable without standing still. It has to stay alert and account for how each new shift affects cybersecurity, the safety of user accounts, and other parts of the stack.
His expectation for the next two years is that Ethereum will support a large number of transactions, that those transactions will be much cheaper than they are today, and that privacy will improve as well. Applications, he said, will not be limited to payments and will increasingly involve interaction with AI.
He noted that some applications already help users pay for AI inference and improve privacy around those payments. In the future, he said, there will also be applications in which AI itself directly participates.
When counterparties, apps, and interaction all become bots
According to Buterin, when a user trades today, the counterparty is very likely already a bot, and that will only become more common. Right now, the counterparty may be a bot while the application is still written by humans. Two years from now, he said, the applications themselves may be written by bots.
He went one step further and said that two years from now, what people currently think of as an “application” may not exist in the same way at all. Instead, different bots may simply publish quotes onchain, while a user’s own bot interprets those quotes, explains what they mean, and decides which ones are worth accepting.
Those changes, he said, reach far beyond finance. The security of personal data is not just an operating-system problem. It is also an AI problem and a hardware problem. 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, not your coins” to “Not your silicon, not your keys”
In the closing section of the talk, Buterin pushed the security discussion down to the hardware layer. He said some people use “SI” to mean superintelligence, but there is another SI that matters just as much: silicon, element 14 on the periodic table, the material underlying modern hardware.
The crypto industry has long said, “Not your keys, not your coins.” Buterin said that in the future, the phrase may become “Not your silicon, not your keys.”
His point was that if a system is meant to be truly secure, then the hardware running that system, and the hardware connecting its results to the real world, also has to be secure.
Blockchain stays at the front line of security and privacy
Buterin said builders need to view what they create as a full technology stack, thinking through each layer: up to the user, across to the blockchain, across to the internet, and down to the hardware.
That, he said, is one reason the blockchain world remains at the front line. Hardware wallets today may become more general-purpose security devices in the future.
He closed by saying the road ahead will remain challenging, meaningful, and interesting. In his view, the blockchain industry will continue to face these issues before much of the rest of the world does, because many of them are problems the entire world will eventually have to confront.
He said he hopes people keep thinking about both the challenges and the opportunities created by new technology: how to use those tools to resist new threats, how to make blockchain more efficient for everyone, and how to show the world what security, privacy, efficiency, and fairness could look like not only in finance, but across computing as a whole.
The text was compiled from a public speech transcript and does not represent the views of Wu Blockchain. It is not investment advice.