Ethereum Foundation creates dAI Team to make a settlement layer for AI

The Ethereum Foundation has announced a dedicated AI team to make Ethereum the preferred settlement and coordination layer for AI agents and the emerging machine economy. Davide Crapis, a research scientist, will lead the team working closely with the Foundation’s Protocol and Ecosystem arms. 

The Foundation revealed that the dAI Team will focus on two primary goals. The first is to give AI agents and robots mechanisms to pay, coordinate, and follow rules without intermediaries, which it described as the AI Economy on Ethereum. The second is to ensure AI development does not become dependent on a few centralized platforms by promoting open, verifiable, and censorship-resistant alternatives, which it described as the Decentralized AI Stack. 

Ethereum aims to build an AI economy with the dAI Team

Davide Crapis, the team’s lead research scientist, revealed in a post that the group aims to bridge the gap between blockchain and AI agents. He noted that AI will be a big part of all humanity and the future of Ethereum usage. He described AI as a new frontier for Ethereum compared to earlier waves of DeFi. He also pledged that the team will build technology and support the interoperability of AI agents on-chain. 

The dAI Team will focus on the ERC-8004 standard, which allows AI agents to be discoverable, verifiable, and transactable across the Ethereum ecosystem. The standard is expected to be completed by November, and the final form will be presented at Devconnect in Buenos Aires. The Foundation also confirmed that the dAI Team will work on related standards and updates alongside channelling funds towards open-source projects supporting agent identity, reputation, and coordination.

According to the Ethereum Foundation, the launch aligns with the firm’s core values and decentralized acceleration philosophy. The firm highlighted its neutrality, verifiability, and censorship resistance values, making it suitable for AI agent transactions. The company noted that Ethereum makes AI more trustworthy and AI makes Ethereum more useful, adding that neutral settlements could help AI transition from centralized architectures. 

The Foundation is expected to release job listings and resources to ramp up the project and form research collaborations with Silicon Valley companies. The team will link research, protocol work, and ecosystem funding to push forward the innovation of AI and blockchain interconnection. The Foundation noted that by providing standards, a settlement layer, and financing for decentralized agent infrastructure, Ethereum will be positioned as a foundational layer for future machine-to-machine and agentic economy. 

ETH price dips by over 2 % to $4,508

Ethereum token price is down 2.2% today, trading at $4,508.95 at the time of writing. The token has also recorded a 0.9% downside over the past 30 days and has a positive YTD of 36.14%. Cryptopolitan wrote last week that some analysts forecast the price of ETH could average $4,551 by the end of 2025 and potentially hit a high of $4,800. Longer-term projections showed that the token may range between $38,150 and $49,492 by 2031. 

A Cryptopolitan report estimated that the price would consolidate at $4,682 soon and stabilize at $4,420 or $4,505 support levels as bearish momentum builds up. It is also estimated that the token may trade around $7,492 by 2026, rising to over $10,200 by 2027 and above $15,800 by 2028.

The report revealed that Ethereum’s role in DeFi, ongoing Layer 2 scaling, and institutional adoptions are the key drivers that will fuel the price rise in the longer term. However, some analysts warn that the volatile nature, regulatory conditions, and macroeconomic conditions remain influential to the price outcomes, leaving ETH’s price direction solely dependent on market dynamics.

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