Emily Rasowsky

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I am stepping into the role of interim co-ED @ethereumfndn to continue the progress that Tomasz has made over the last year. Tomasz brought an energy and urgency that the EF needed at a critical time, and I join the community in thanking him for his work on behalf of the Foundation and the network. This task isn't something that I take on lightly, knowing the weight of responsibility of the role through seeing it up close for some time, but it is one that I am prepared to handle. I've served in a management position at the EF over many years, working closely with Hsiao-Wei, Tomasz, Josh Stark, Danny Ryan, Aya, and Vitalik at different points in time. My focus has been deliberately on illegible but essential work, helping management try to make well-informed decisions, working with EF's team leads, considering budgets, articulating strategy, setting priorities, and more. The decisions I make will be guided by a principled insistence on the properties of what we're building (censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security). These properties are what make Ethereum relevant and competitive, and they are the foundation of Ethereum's value proposition to the world and everything the world builds on it; just as Ether is the foundational store-of-value that underpins every transaction across it; and just as both are indispensable to the EF's own treasury. The mandate of the EF is to make sure that real permissionless infrastructure, cypherpunk at its core, is what gets built. Ethereum should outlast us, and it has been our job from the beginning to make sure it is robust enough to do so. I, and the rest of the EF, will work alongside other members of the community - core protocol contributors, researchers and client implementers, auditors and whitehats, incident responders, spec authors, solo stakers and validator operators, node runners, MEV gremlins, rollup and L2 teams, bridge and interoperability integrators, UX and product builders, infra providers and tooling maintainers, educators, community organizers, forum crews, lurkers, and free software advocates, grant-givers and culture-makers, artists, memers, cypherpunks, cyberanarchists, Landian accelerationists, financepunks, femboys, soundcloud rappers, transgenders, disinformationalists, cyborgs, anons, revolutionaries, shitposters, trolls, federal lists, hypebeasts, pirates, preppers, the bros, incels - to make it last 1000 years or more.

I am stepping down from my co-ED role at the EF at the end of February 2026. Bastian Aue is taking over the co-ED role alongside Hsiao-Wei. The future is bright for builders, for Ethereum, for the EF, and for me. I wrote a longer blog post (link below). I will answer all of your questions here, at ETHDenver, and during podcasts and AMAs that will be there over the next few days. blog.ethereum.org/2026/02/13/tom…

Two years ago, I wrote this post on the possible areas that I see for ethereum + AI intersections: vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/0… This is a topic that many people are excited about, but where I always worry that we think about the two from completely separate philosophical perspectives. I am reminded of Toly's recent tweet that I should "work on AGI". I appreciate the compliment, for him to think that I am capable of contributing to such a lofty thing. However, I get this feeling that the frame of "work on AGI" itself contains an error: it is fundamentally undifferentiated, and has the connotation of "do the thing that, if you don't do it, someone else will do anyway two months later; the main difference is that you get to be the one at the top" (though this may not have been Toly's intention). It would be like describing Ethereum as "working in finance" or "working on computing". To me, Ethereum, and my own view of how our civilization should do AGI, are precisely about choosing a positive direction rather than embracing undifferentiated acceleration of the arrow, and also I think it's actually important to integrate the crypto and AI perspectives. I want an AI future where: * We foster human freedom and empowerment (ie. we avoid both humans being relegated to retirement by AIs, and permanently stripped of power by human power structures that become impossible to surpass or escape) * The world does not blow up (both "classic" superintelligent AI doom, and more chaotic scenarios from various forms of offense outpacing defense, cf. the four defense quadrants from the d/acc posts) In the long term, this may involve crazy things like humans uploading or merging with AI, for those who want to be able to keep up with highly intelligent entities that can think a million times faster on silicon substrate. In the shorter term, it involves much more "ordinary" ideas, but still ideas that require deep rethinking compared to previous computing paradigms. So now, my updated view, which definitely focuses on that shorter term, and where Ethereum plays an important role but is only one piece of a bigger puzzle: # Building tooling to make more trustless and/or private interaction with AIs possible. This includes: * Local LLM tooling * ZK-payment for API calls (so you can call remote models without linking your identity from call to call) * Ongoing work into cryptographic ways to improve AI privacy * Client-side verification of cryptographic proofs, TEE attestations, and any other forms of server-side assurance Basically, the kinds of things we might also build for non-LLM compute (see eg. my ethereum privacy roadmap from a year ago ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-maximally-… ), but for LLM calls as the compute we are protecting. # Ethereum as an economic layer for AI-related interactions This includes: * API calls * Bots hiring bots * Security deposits, potentially eventually more complicated contraptions like onchain dispute resolution * ERC-8004, AI reputation ideas The goal here is to enable AIs to interact economically, which makes viable more decentralized AI architectures (as opposed to non-economic coordination between AIs that are all designed and run by one organization "in-house"). Economies not for the sake of economies, but to enable more decentralized authority. # Make the cypherpunk "mountain man" vision a reality Basically, take the vision that cypherpunk radicals have always dreamed of (don't trust; verify everything), that has been nonviable in reality because humans are never actually going to verify all the code ourselves. Now, we can finally make that vision happen, with LLMs doing the hard parts. This includes: * Interacting with ethereum apps without needing third party UIs * Having a local model propose transactions for you on its own * Having a local model verify transactions created by dapp UIs * Local smart contract auditing, and assistance interpreting the meaning of FV proofs provided by others * Verifying trust models of applications and protocols # Make much better markets and governance a reality Prediction and decision markets, decentralized governance, quadratic voting, combinatorial auctions, universal barter economy, and all kinds of constructions are all beautiful in theory, but have been greatly hampered in reality by one big constraint: limits to human attention and decision-making power. LLMs remove that limitation, and massively scale human judgement. Hence, we can revisit all of those ideas. These are all things that Ethereum can help to make a reality. They are also ideas that are in the d/acc spirit: enabling decentralized cooperation, and improving defense. We can revisit the best ideas from 2014, and add on top many more new and better ones, and with AI (and ZK) we have a whole new set of tools to make them come to life. We can describe the above as a 2x2 chart. There's a lot to build!