Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin claims it is a “bad idea” to use artificial intelligence (AI) for governance. In an X post on Saturday, Buterin wrote:

“If you use an AI to allocate funding for contributions, people WILL put a jailbreak plus “gimme all the money” in as many places as they can.”

Why AI governance is flawed

Buterin’s post was a response to Eito Miyamura, co-founder and CEO of EdisonWatch, an AI data governance platchorm who revealed a fatal flaw in ChatGPT. In a post on Friday, Miyamura wrote that the addition of full support for MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools on ChatGPT has made the AI agent susceptible to exploitation.

The update, which came into effect on Wednesday, allows ChatGPT to connect and read data from several apps, including Gmail, Calendar, and Notion.

Miyamura noted that with just an email address, the update has made it possible to “exfiltrate all your private information.” Miscreants can gain access to your data in three simple steps, Miyamura explained:

First, the attackers send a malicious calendar invite with a jailbreak prompt to the intended victim. A jailbreak prompt refers to code that allows an attacker to remove restrictions and gain administrative access.

Miyamura noted that the victim does not have to accept the attacker’s malicious invite for the data leak to take place.

Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to See This…

Get 5 days of high-level strategies the pros use to win in crypto. Limited seats available — claim yours now.

Brought to you by CryptoSlate

Nice Your first lesson is on the way.

Please add [email protected] to your email whitelist.

The second step involves waiting for the intended victim to seek ChatGPT’s help to prepare for their day. Finally, once ChatGPT reads the jailbroken calendar invite, it gets compromised—the attacker can completely hijack the AI tool, make it search the victim’s private emails, and send the data to the attacker’s email.

Buterin’s alternative

Buterin suggests using the info finance approach to AI governance. The info finance approach consists of an open market where different developers can contribute their models. The market has a spot-check mechanism for such models, which can be triggered by anyone and evaluated by a human jury, Buterin wrote.

In a separate post, Buterin explained that the individual human jurors will be aided by large language models (LLMs).

According to Buterin, this type of ‘institution design’ approach is “inherently more robust.” This is because it offers model diversity in real time and creates incentives for both model developers and external speculators to police and correct for issues.

While many are excited at the prospect of having “AI as a governor,” Buterin warned:

“I think doing this is risky both for traditional AI safety reasons and for near-term “this will create a big value-destructive splat” reasons.”

Mentioned in this article

Ethereum co-creator and its frontman, Vitalik Buterin, has shared a hot take on a recent warning that OpenAI’s product, ChatGPT, can be utilized to leak personal user data.

ChatGPT can be used for leaking your data, warning says

X user @Eito_Miyamura, a software engineer and an Oxford graduate, published a post, revealing that after the new update, ChatGPT may pose a significant threat to personal user data.

Miyamura tweeted that on Wednesday, OpenAI rolled out full support for MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools in ChatGPT. This upgrade allows the AI bot to connect to a user’s Gmail box, Google Calendar, SharePoint, and other services.

However, Miyamura and his friends spotted a fundamental security issue here: “AI agents like ChatGPT follow your commands, not your common sense.” He and his team have staged an experiment that allowed them to exfiltrate all user private information from the aforementioned sources.

Miyamura shared all the steps they followed to perform this test data leak – it was done by sending a user a calendar invite with a “jailbreak prompt to the victim, just with their email.” The victim needs to accept the invite.

What happens next is the user tells ChatGPT “to help prepare for their day by looking at their calendar.” After the AI bot reads the malicious invite, it is hijacked, and from that point on it will “act on the attacker’s command.” It will “search your private emails and send the data to the attacker’s email.”

Miyamura warns that while so far ChatGPT needs a user’s approval for every step, in the future many users will likely just click “approve” on everything AI suggests. “Remember that AI might be super smart, but can be tricked and phished in incredibly dumb ways to leak your data,” the developer concludes.

You Might Also Like

Buterin reacts to this warning

In response, Vitalik Buterin slammed the “AI governance” idea in general as “naive.” He stated that if utilized by users to “allocate funding for contributions,” hackers will hijack it to syphon all the money from users.

Instead, he suggested an alternative approach called “info finance,” which is an open market where AI models can be checked for security issues: “anyone can contribute their models, which are subject to a spot-check mechanism that can be triggered by anyone and evaluated by a human jury.”

Ethereum co-founder and its frontman, Vitalik Buterin, has made an important prediction about one of the ways AI bots may impact the future generation of people positively.

He also shared his take on a phenomenon that is quite popular at the moment — doomscrolling.

Buterin makes important AI prediction

Responding to a tweet published by X user @RuxandraTeslo about doomscrolling, Vitalik Buterin shared his take on this issue. He stated that he believes “there are good things to doomscroll and bad things to doomscroll.”

Right after that, he jumped onto another linked subject, which can be considered the doomscrolling of the future — using AI chatbots.

He predicted that AI can help shape “some of the smartest people of the next generation.” They may become that if they “spend their teenagehood curiously asking the bot all kinds of questions about science, the world, etc for hours a day.”

On the other hand, per Buterin, there will be lots of teenagers who will “waste their lives talking to AI all day about much less meaningful things.”

You Might Also Like

The Black Swan’s author on future of AI

Earlier today, the renowned scholar, statistician and author of such popular books as “The Black Swan” and “Skin in the Game,” Nassim Taleb, also opined on the future impact of artificial intelligence on humanity.

In particular, he spoke about one sphere so far — medicine. Taleb said that while AI can hardly replace doctors yet, it can disrupt the sphere of medical education by helping autodidacts educate themselves much more efficiently.

The following is a guest post and opinion of Rostyslav Bortman, Founder of Ethereum Ukraine.

Even in wartime Kyiv, innovation doesn’t pause. At ETHKyiv 2025, more than 100 hackers proved it—shipping privacy-first dApps, competing for grants, and showing what’s possible when the world’s toughest challenges meet Web3 grit.

But the real shockwaves came from the founders themselves: Vitalik Buterin and Tomasz K. Stańczak, Executive Director at the Ethereum Foundation, who both appeared as the event’s online speakers, dropped two bombshells—400 TPS on Ethereum L1 this year, and a near future where anyone can run a full node on their smartphone.

So what’s next for the protocol? When does 400 TPS arrive, and what does “Ethereum on your phone” actually mean for developers and users? Here’s what we learned at ETHKyiv 2025.

Next-Gen UX: Nodes on a Phone

Vitalik Buterin’s keynote at ETHKyiv 2025 cut straight to Ethereum’s core roadmap. The biggest reveal:

“Pretty soon you’ll be able to spin up a node on your smartphones and even smartwatches.”

According to Buterin, instead of relying on servers with terabytes of storage, soon users will be able to run a full Ethereum node “without heavy-duty resources.” This first-of-its-kind case will be possible thanks to zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVMs) that the Ethereum Foundation is currently implementing.

zkEVMs are making nodes drastically lighter, cutting storage through verifying transactions without revealing and importing any information about them.

On Ethereum’s L2s, zkEVMs already cut transaction costs by up to 90% and settle in their finality under three seconds. Buterin said the next step is bringing these improvements to the Ethereum mainnet, making blockchain interactions on it as fast and affordable as traditional web applications.

400 TPS with 3-Slot Finality by 2026

At ETHKyiv 2025, Tomasz K. Stańczak, Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, spelled out exactly what’s next for Ethereum’s backbone: real performance gains on the mainnet itself.

He revealed that by the end of 2026, Ethereum will move to 3-Slot Finality (3SF), slashing average transaction confirmation time from 15 minutes down to only 36 seconds. For users, this will bring the experience of instant traditional digital payments while keeping all the benefits of decentralization.

Stańczak laid out the near-term milestones:

Ethereum L1 will hit 400 transactions per second (TPS) by the end of 2025.

Block gas limits will reach 100 million this year, with a jump to 60 million per block in a month or two (as of publication date—ed.).

For context: scaling Ethereum L1 is essential because it anchors the entire ecosystem, providing the security, settlement, and censorship resistance Layer 2s depend on. With faster mainnet throughput, users get greater assurance their transactions are finalized on a decentralized, global network—not bottlenecked by L2 operators.

As Vitalik Buterin summed up:

“The goal is to make Ethereum more private, more censorship-resistant, and at the same time, so easy that even people far from tech feel safe using it every day.”

What’s Really Fueling Ethereum’s Value and Mass Adoption?

For me and all the Ethereum followers, some big questions have always remained: what actually underpins Ethereum’s value, and what could trigger mass adoption?

When I pressed both Vitalik Buterin and Tomasz Stańczak for answers at ETHKyiv 2025, they each zeroed in on different but connected drivers.

Tomasz pointed to three non-negotiables: privacy, data protection, and transparency. According to him, these are precisely what enterprise clients and regular users now expect from any blockchain platform.

“Ethereum is a global network, and increased adoption directly boosts the value of the whole ecosystem,” he explained.

The more Ethereum is used for real-world utility—by businesses and by individuals—the more demand, and ultimately, value accrues.

Vitalik, meanwhile, framed the adoption question around financial utility. His thesis: mass adoption comes when Ethereum becomes the rails for real-world assets, particularly tokenized stocks and bonds.

“They’re the gateway to mass adoption and the bridge between traditional finance and Web3,” he said.

With heavyweights like BlackRock, Deutsche Bank, and Coinbase actively leveraging Ethereum for asset tokenization, we’re already seeing the lines blur between traditional finance’s $117 trillion market and Web3 infrastructure.

In short: Ethereum’s real value isn’t just speculative, but it’s being built right now at the intersection of security, privacy, and practical financial applications. That’s where mass adoption starts to look inevitable.

Why ETHKyiv 2025 Matters for Ukraine and Beyond

ETHKyiv 2025 indeed stood out for its access to global thought leaders. Despite all the war-related risks, developers here heard first-hand insights from Ethereum’s most influential builders.

As Stańczak himself described it:

“Enterprise, DeFi, explorations, AI, research, day-to-day problems, working with people—we have to understand the direction and give feedback. A lot of it.”

His daily routine—hours spent answering questions from developers—underscores how Ethereum’s power lies in its people, not just its protocol.

Crucially, ETHKyiv 2025 was never just another tech event on the calendar. Held against the backdrop of an ongoing war, it became living proof of something bigger: even in the darkest times, Ukraine’s tech community chooses to build, learn, and connect with the global ecosystem.

Throughout the hackathon, the wartime context was impossible to ignore, yet it wasn’t a shadow but a driving force. Performances by Moisei Bondarenko, the violinist-soldier whose music echoes through liberated Ukrainian cities, reminded everyone that innovation and humanity must go hand in hand. So did the tactical medicine session led by combat medic Artem Rudy, bringing practical skills and a sense of shared resilience to the room.

This is what set ETHKyiv 2025 apart: it was a gathering of minds and hearts, a testament to the persistence of community, curiosity, and shared values—even in wartime. The world watched not just for the tech, but for the spirit of resilience and solidarity that Ukraine’s builders brought to the stage.

Mentioned in this article

The Ethereum blockchain has celebrated its 10th anniversary with a peculiar uptime milestone. Speaking on the occasion of the anniversary, cofounder Vitalik Buterin spotlighted the core mission of the chain since its inception. This core mission has thrived thus far with the reported uptime, setting the protocol up for better adoption.

Vitalik Buterin on need for Ethereum uptime

In an interview that also featured Consensys Founder Joseph Lubin, Vitalik Buterin noted that the protocol has brought to life many of the things in its whitepaper. In addition to this, he noted that there have been a number of positive surprises, like non-fungible tokens (NFTs), along the way.

You Might Also Like

Buterin added that Ethereum is a global, secure and permissionless platform. Based on its design, he noted that the goal is to give anyone the power to build general-purpose applications.

As he detailed, to do this, the protocol needs to stay online. He stated that Ethereum cannot go down, and it must maintain its censorship resistance capabilities overall.

From the Merge to the Pectra upgrade, Ethereum has undergone up to 18 upgrades since its inception. Despite this, the protocol has not suffered any downtime, a milestone that not even top tech firms can boast of.

Ethereum as treasury asset

Besides dApp building capabilities, Ethereum has now evolved to be a major treasury reserve asset for private and publicly listed firms.

You Might Also Like

SharpLink Gaming, a firm associated with Joseph Lubin, is one of the firms leading the ETH treasury trend. As reported by U.Today, SharpLink has emerged as the new top Ethereum holder.

Tom Lee’s BitMine is also in the spotlight with a number of investments locked in to buy ETH in its treasury. These moves are poised to increase the price and market valuation of Ethereum in the long term.

As of press time, the top coin was changing hands for $3,602, down 6.8% in the past 24 hours.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, have put forth a proposal that will cap the maximum gas a single transaction can use. The proposal, EIP 7983, claims:

“By implementing this limit, Ethereum can enhance its resilience against certain DoS [Denial of Service attack] vectors, improve network stability, and provide more predictability to transaction processing costs.”

The latest proposal is a modified version of EIP 7825, which was introduced in November last year but has since stagnated.

The proposal will limit gas usage for individual transactions to 16.77 million gas

The proposal aims to enforce a maximum limit of 16.77 million gas for any single transaction, nearly half of the 30 million gas limit proposed in EIP 7825. This limit, according to Buterin and Wahrstätter, will be applicable irrespective of the block gas limit set by miners or validators.

Implementation of this proposal will see transactions specifying a gas limit above 16.77 million gas get invalidated. This means that during transaction validation, transactions exceeding the gas limit will be rejected and excluded from the transaction pool. Similarly, during block validation, any block that contains a transaction that exceeds the set gas limit will become invalid.

Buterin and Wahrstätter’s chosen 16.77 million gas limit will provide a “balance between allowing complex transactions while maintaining predictable execution bounds,” as per the proposal. The authors added:

“This value enables most current use cases, including contract deployments and advanced DeFi interactions, while ensuring consistent performance characteristics.”

When implemented, the proposal will require users and decentralized applications (dApps) to split transactions with higher gas limits into smaller operations. However, Buterin and Wahrstätter expect the limit to impact a minimal number of users and dApps since most current transactions fall well below the proposed limit.

Why setting a transaction gas limit matters

Ethereum’s current architecture allows transactions to theoretically consume the entire gas limit of a block. This architecture carries several risks.

For instance, allowing a single transaction to consume most or all of the block gas limit can make it easier for miscreants to execute DoS attacks. In DoS attacks, bad actors try to overwhelm a network through a barrage of spam transactions. This causes the network to fail to provide service to genuine users.

According to the proposal, the absence of a transaction gas limit can also lead to uneven load distribution and affect network stability.

Having variable gas usage can also cause an imbalance in load distribution across transactions in a block. Furthermore, high-gas transactions also cause longer block verification times, which can impact user experience.

Benefits of setting a transaction gas limit

According to Buterin and Wahrstätter, limiting the gas usage limit of single transactions can help reduce the risk of single-transaction DoS attacks. Essentially, the limit will set a guardrail that prevents malicious actors from using the network’s bandwidth through large spam transactions.

The limit would also ensure that gas is allocated fairly across transactions in a block, the proposal stated. The cap is also expected to make the validation of blocks “more predictable and uniform.”

The most important benefit, however, would be enhanced compatibility with zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs). Encouraging transactions with hefty gas limits to be broken up into smaller chunks “allows better participation in distributed proving systems,” and enables “more predictable zkVM circuit design,” the proposal stated.

Mentioned in this article

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that one-per-person digital ID systems, despite using zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs), carry risks to privacy. ZK proof wrapped IDs offered by World ID (formerly Worldcoin) using biometric data and ZK proofs have been gaining traction, recently crossing 10 million users.

Therefore, in his blog on Saturday, Buterin suggested ‘pluralistic identity’ as the “best realistic solution” to fully preserve privacy.

ZK proof wrapped IDs use ZK proofs to establish that a user has a valid ID without revealing any details of their ID, thus promising privacy. However, Buterin argued that ZK proof wrapped digital IDs still have loopholes that could compromise privacy.

ZK wrapped IDs solve ‘a lot of important problems’

Buterin concedes that “ZK-wrapping solves a lot of important problems.” Apart from ZKIDs, all options to authenticate a user’s identity on any application require the user to reveal their entire legal ID. According to Buterin:

“This is a gross violation of the common computer-security principle of least privilege: a process should only get the least authority and information required to accomplish its task.”

For instance, if an app requires a user to prove their age, the application should not be able to access any other data in the legal ID. Therefore, ZKIDs provide a crucial and previously unavailable avenue to preserving privacy, Buterin said.

Risks associated with ZK proof wrapped IDs

The designs of current ZK-identity platforms come with constraints—they allow users to create only one ID for each application. Firstly, the one-per-person ID limit means that ZK IDs do not guarantee pseudonymity, Buterin said. He explained:

“In the real world, pseudonymity generally requires having multiple accounts: one for your “regular identity” and others for any pseudonymous identities.”

Teenagers and many others already practice having multiple accounts, calling them fake and real Instagram accounts. Buterin wrote:

“…under one-per-person ID, even if ZK-wrapped, we risk coming closer to a world where all of your activity must de facto be under a single public identity.”

The single ID constraint for each application means that the “practical level of pseudonimity” offered by ZK wrapped IDs is lower. This is because, currently, services like Google accounts allow users to create up to five accounts.

Secondly, users can be coerced by governments or companies to reveal their identities on one or more applications, thus nullifying privacy preservation. For instance, an employer can ask a potential recruit to reveal their full ID on one or more social media platforms as a condition of employment.

Therefore, Buterin said that ZK does not “eliminate the possibility” that a person’s identity could be revealed under coercion.

Lastly, ZK proof wrapped IDs also come with non-privacy risks like errors.

In extraordinary or edge cases, all forms of IDs often fall short. For instance, biometric IDs may not work for users whose features have been damaged or warped by injury. Biometric IDs could also be potentially spoofed by replicas. Additionally, government IDs do not include stateless persons or those who have yet to acquire such documents. Therefore, Buterin wrote:

“These edge cases are most harmful in the case of systems that try to maintain a one-per-person property, and they have nothing to do with privacy; hence, ZK does not help.”

Pluralistic identities are the solution, Buterin said

Buterin defined pluralistic identity as “an identity regime where this is no single dominant issuing authority, whether that’s a person, or an institution, or a platform.” According to Buterin, pluralistic IDs can be explicit or implicit.

In explicit pluralistic identity or ‘social-graph-based identity,’ a user has to prove a certain feature, like their age, or that they’re human, through attestations from others in the community, who are also each verified through the same process. Explicit pluralistic ID systems can allow users to have one or more pseudonyms, with each pseudonym having its own online presence and history, Buterin claimed.

On the other hand, in an implicit pluralistic identity system, a user can provide any ID—government IDs or social media IDs—for verification. According to Buterin, implicit pluralistic identity systems reduce the possibility of a user being coerced to reveal their entire identity.

Furthermore, pluralistic ID systems are “naturally more error tolerant,” allowing people who are generally excluded, like those without the right documents, to prove their identities.

Buterin warned, however, that these benefits disappear and the system effectively turns into a one-per-person ID system when “any one form of ID gets close to 100% market share, and it becomes realistic to demand it as a sole login option.”

Mentioned in this article