Through its support of Security Alliance, the foundation is funding dedicated engineers to track and disrupt crypto drainers and social engineering attacks. At the same time, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a vision in which AI enhances privacy, security, and usability on Ethereum, from verifying transactions and detecting scams to acting as a trusted intermediary between users and decentralized applications.
Ethereum Foundation Backs Fight Against Crypto Scams
The Ethereum Foundation stepped up its fight to protect users on the Ethereum network by sponsoring crypto security nonprofit Security Alliance (SEAL) in a new initiative aimed at tracking and neutralizing crypto drainers and other forms of social engineering attacks. The move was made in reaction to the growing concern over sophisticated scams that target Ethereum users through phishing campaigns, fake websites, and deceptive wallet approval requests that can quickly drain funds.
SEAL announced that the collaboration led to the launch of what it calls the “Trillion Dollar Security” initiative, which is designed to boost Ethereum’s defenses as the ecosystem scales. According to SEAL, the partnership came together after it approached the Ethereum Foundation late last year looking for funding to support dedicated security engineers. The goal was to more closely monitor drainer development, analyze attacker infrastructure, and proactively disrupt large-scale campaigns before they spread widely.
As part of the arrangement, the Ethereum Foundation is now sponsoring a full-time security engineer whose sole focus is working alongside SEAL’s intelligence team to combat drainers specifically targeting Ethereum users. SEAL said this role is intended to deepen coordination between white-hat researchers and defenders, allowing faster identification of emerging threats and more effective countermeasures. The nonprofit’s overall mission is to protect crypto market participants through shared threat intelligence, coordinated incident response, and legal protections for ethical hackers who help expose vulnerabilities.
The Ethereum Foundation publicly endorsed the initiative, and stated on X that SEAL has already delivered meaningful benefits to the ecosystem through its past work in countering attacks.
Social engineering is one of the most damaging attack vectors in crypto. Scammers often impersonate legitimate protocols or wallet providers, tricking users into approving transactions that appear harmless but grant attackers sweeping permissions.
While the techniques have grown more refined, coordinated defense efforts have begun to show results. According to estimates from crypto intelligence platform ScamSniffer, scammers have stolen close to $1 billion in crypto over the years. However, sustained efforts by SEAL and other security researchers helped push losses down to roughly $84 million in 2025.
Alongside the operational work, SEAL and the Ethereum Foundation have launched a Trillion Dollar Security dashboard to measure Ethereum’s resilience across multiple dimensions. The dashboard tracks areas like user experience, smart contracts, infrastructure, consensus, incident response, and governance, with dozens of risk controls identified and prioritized.
Vitalik Buterin Maps AI’s Role in Ethereum
Meanwhile, Vitalik Buterin shared a forward-looking vision for how Ethereum and artificial intelligence could converge to strengthen markets, enhance financial safety, and reinforce human agency rather than diminish it.
In a recent post on X, Buterin explained that while his long-term view sees AI as a tool that empowers humans, the more immediate opportunities lie in practical, near-term integrations between AI systems and the Ethereum ecosystem.
At the center of Buterin’s thinking is the idea that Ethereum can provide a trusted, decentralized foundation for AI interactions. He pointed out several areas where the two technologies could intersect, including enabling trustless or privacy-preserving interactions with AI systems, positioning Ethereum as an economic coordination layer for AI-to-AI activity, and using AI to help verify on-chain activity at a scale that would be impossible for humans alone. According to Buterin, this approach could make markets more efficient and governance processes more robust, while also reducing reliance on centralized intermediaries.
Privacy plays a major role in this vision. Buterin argued that for AI to be safely and widely adopted, users must be able to interact with AI systems without exposing sensitive data or personal identities. To address this, Buterin pointed to the need for running AI models locally on personal devices, using zero-knowledge proofs to anonymize API calls, and advancing cryptographic techniques that allow AI-generated work to be verified without revealing private inputs.
Beyond privacy, Buterin sees AI acting as an intelligent intermediary between users and the blockchain. In this model, AI agents could audit transactions, interact directly with decentralized applications, flag suspicious behavior, and suggest actions to users before funds are moved. This could be particularly valuable as crypto scams grow more sophisticated, with attack methods like address poisoning increasing sharply over the past few months.
By delegating complex verification tasks to AI, Buterin believes Ethereum can finally realize the long-standing cypherpunk ideal of “don’t trust, verify,” which is a principle that has historically been impractical for everyday users. He also envisions autonomous AI bots interacting economically on-chain, hiring each other, managing API calls, and posting security deposits on behalf of users.
In his view, these AI-driven economies are not an end in themselves, but a means to create more decentralized authority and make crypto systems more accessible to a wider audience.
