Vitalik Buterin Proposes Ethereum as Economic Infrastructure for AGI

TL;DR: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed the blockchain platform as economic infrastructure for artificial general intelligence, outlining how it could enable decentralised AI-to-AI transactions, bot-to-bot employment contracts, and on-chain dispute resolution for autonomous agents.

Buterin’s proposal addresses a practical problem: as AI agents become more capable and autonomous, they will need ways to transact with each other without relying on centralised intermediaries. His argument is that Ethereum already provides the trust-minimised infrastructure that such interactions require.

The Proposal

The specific use cases Buterin outlined include decentralised API call authorisation, where AI agents could pay for and access services without human intervention. He described bot-to-bot employment arrangements, where one AI agent could hire another for specific tasks, with security deposits and on-chain dispute resolution handling disagreements automatically.

Buterin also advocated for tools that make AI agent interactions both trustless and private. He highlighted local language model tools, zero-knowledge payment systems, and trusted execution environment attestations as priorities for the industry. Client-side proof verification and server-side security round out his list of technical building blocks.

Philosophical Alignment

Buterin argued that Ethereum and AGI share philosophical foundations — both aim to create systems that operate without requiring trust in any single party. He criticised Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko’s approach to AI and blockchain integration as “unnecessarily narrow,” though he did not elaborate on the specific disagreements.

He also highlighted areas where large language models are already overcoming their earlier limitations, pointing to improvements in prediction markets, decentralised governance, and combinatorial auctions — all areas where AI agents operating on blockchain infrastructure could add practical value.

Looking Forward

Whether AGI will actually need blockchain infrastructure remains an open question. Buterin’s proposal assumes a future where autonomous AI agents transact independently at scale, which depends on developments in AI capability that have not yet materialised. But the framing is notable: rather than positioning blockchain as a speculative asset class, Buterin is making the case that decentralised infrastructure could become the economic backbone for the next generation of AI systems. If autonomous agents do become widespread, the question of how they handle money, contracts, and disputes will need answering — and existing blockchain technology is one plausible answer.