Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a technical overhaul of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), calling for the use of personal artificial intelligence agents to privately vote on behalf of users and help evolve digital governance.
The plan, published on social media platform
Instead, individuals would deploy their own AI model, trained on their past messages and stated values, to vote on the thousands of decisions the DAOs face.
“There are thousands of decisions to be made, involving many areas of expertise, and most people have neither the time nor the skills to be experts in even one, much less all of them. » Buterin wrote. “So what can we do? We use personal LLMs to solve the attention problem.”
The first is content privacy, ensuring that sensitive data remains confidential. AI agents would operate in secure environments such as Multi-Party Computing (MPC) or Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), allowing them to process private data without leaking it to the public blockchain.
Second, the anonymity of the participant. Buterin called for the use of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), a cryptographic tool that allows users to prove they are eligible to vote without revealing their wallet address or how they voted.
This protects against coercion, corruption and whale watching, where small voters imitate the decisions of large token holders.
These AI managers would automate routine participation in governance and only flag key issues for human review.
To filter out low-quality or spammy submissions, an emerging problem as generative AI floods open forums, Buterin suggests launching prediction markets. In these cases, agents could bet on the probability that the proposals would be accepted.
Good bets would yield winnings, encouraging valuable contributions while penalizing noise.
Buterin also called for privacy-preserving tools, such as trusted multi-party computation and execution environments, allowing AI agents to evaluate sensitive data, such as job applications or legal disputes, without exposing it on a public blockchain.
Read more: From 2016 Hack to $150M Endowment: DAO’s Second Act Focuses on Ethereum Security
