Ethereum Foundation Launches Revolutionary AI Team to Supercharge Agentic Payments

BREAKING: Ethereum goes full Skynet—but for your wallet.

The Agentic Revolution

Forget clunky manual transactions. The Ethereum Foundation just dropped a bombshell: a dedicated AI team building autonomous payment agents that execute complex financial operations without human intervention. These aren't your grandma's smart contracts—they're adaptive, learning systems that negotiate, optimize, and execute in real-time.

Cutting Out the Middleman—Literally

Traditional finance layers? Gone. These AI agents bypass banks, processors, and even traditional DeFi interfaces. They operate on pure code—slicing transaction costs while turbocharging efficiency. No more waiting for confirmations or praying gas fees don't spike mid-swap.

Why This Changes Everything

Agentic payments don't just move value—they think. They analyze market conditions, predict liquidity shifts, and route transactions through optimal paths. It's like having a hedge fund quant in your pocket, minus the obscene bonus and the cocaine habit.

The Ironic Twist

Sure, Wall Street will spin this as 'disruptive innovation' while quietly trying to regulate it into oblivion. Because nothing terrifies traditional finance more than algorithms that actually work better than their overpaid analysts.

Ethereum's betting big on AI-driven autonomy. The rest of finance? Still trying to figure out how to block it on their corporate networks.

Ethereum Foundation background

The EF is a non-profit organization based in Zug, Switzerland, that funds and coordinates the development of the Ethereum blockchain. It does not control the network but plays a catalytic role by supporting researchers, developers and ecosystem projects.

Its remit includes funding upgrades such as Ethereum 2.0, zero-knowledge proofs and layer-2 scaling, alongside community programs like the Ecosystem Support Program. The foundation also organizes events such as Devcon to foster collaboration and acts as a policy advocate for blockchain adoption.

In 2025, EF restructured to handle Ethereum’s growth, emphasizing ecosystem acceleration, founder support and enterprise outreach. The new DAI Team represents a continuation of this shift toward specialized units addressing emerging technologies.

Crapis’s role

Crapis is a research scientist at the EF and will lead the new dAI Team. He said the group will connect its work with both the EF’s protocol group and its ecosystem support arm.

“Ethereum makes AI more trustworthy, and AI makes Ethereum more useful,” he wrote, adding that the team intends to fund public goods and projects at the intersection of AI and blockchains.

ERC-8004 and Trust Standards

The group will build on recent work around ERC-8004, a proposed Ethereum standard that Crapis described as a way to prove who an AI agent is and whether it can be trusted. By offering identity and reputation systems for autonomous agents, the standard is intended to allow coordination without centralized gatekeepers.

Crapis said the team will support new standards and upgrades as they emerge, guided by Ethereum’s values and the “d/acc” philosophy of decentralized acceleration. The goal, he explained, is to ensure AI development remains open and verifiable while giving humans greater agency over how intelligent systems interact with the economy.

Why it matters

For Ethereum, the MOVE signals a growing ambition to anchor emerging technologies beyond finance.

If AI agents begin transacting at scale, demand could grow for settlement rails, reputation systems and standards that run natively on Ethereum. For the AI community, the initiative offers an alternative to centralized platforms that currently dominate AI infrastructure.

“The more intelligent agents transact, the more they need a neutral base layer for value and reputation,” Crapis said. “Ethereum benefits by becoming that layer and AI benefits by escaping lock-in to a few centralized platforms.”

The team has begun hiring and publishing resources, according to Crapis. He said EF intends to work “with purpose and urgency” to connect AI developers with the Ethereum ecosystem and to accelerate research at the boundary of the two fields.