Vitalik Buterin · Ethereum · Decrypt
Ethereum Now Lets You Pay for AI Without Revealing Who You Are
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◎ Multiple-sources
The Ethereum Foundation has put zkAPI live on Ethereum's main network, a system that lets people pay for AI services without tying their identity to what they ask, according to the Ethereum Foundation's announcement.
Key facts
- In August 2025, Crapis and Marco De Rossi proposed the ERC-8004 standard, a shared rulebook that lets autonomous AI agents find each other, verify identity and transact
- The idea comes from a proposal Davide Crapis and Vitalik Buterin posted on Ethereum Research in February
- In April, he showed the other path: running an open-source model locally on his own Nvidia 5090 graphics card instead of feeding his life to cloud services
- The Ethereum Foundation has put zkAPI live on Ethereum's main network, a system that lets people pay for AI services without tying their identity to what they ask, according to the Ethereum
Summary
The Ethereum Foundation and the Open Anonymity Project announced zkAPI on Ethereum mainnet on October 1, letting users prepay in USDC and receive capped, short-lived API keys through zero-knowledge proofs. The design follows a February 2026 Ethereum Research proposal by Davide Crapis, who leads the foundation's dAI team, and Vitalik Buterin. The project's repository labels the protocol experimental, and its documentation points to OpenRouter as the AI provider behind the keys. “Prompts are personal.