# Crypto x AI, AI x Crypto A Survey | Professor Ari Juels (IC3) at ETHConf

- Channel: [ETHGlobal](https://streameth.org/ethglobal)
- Date: 2026-07-09
- Duration: 19:12
- Topics: IC3, Ari Juels, ETHCom, crypto AI survey, AI middleware, smart contracts, oracles, flight insurance, parametric insurance, AXA Fizzy, LLM enhanced oracles, AI investment, Eliza OS, coinouts, collective investment algorithms, front running, DePIN, GPU networks, decentralized training, Consilient, trusted execution environments, TEE, confidential lending, zero knowledge proofs, whistleblowers, Pyred, code audits, rogue agents, unstoppable autonomous agents, UAAS, stablecoins, World
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-rvpy605gcWw
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvpy605gcWw

## Description

In this talk, Professor Ari Juels, co-director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), presents a lightning tour of a newly released 150 page survey on the intersection of crypto and AI, written with a long roster of co-authors. He opens by arguing that crypto and AI are not natural bedfellows. Crypto is hard: strictly programmatic and unforgiving, as shown by the Kelp DAO attack where a single poisoned message let the North Korean Lazarus group steal hundreds of millions. AI is soft: frontier models are unpredictable and error prone, like ChatGPT confidently saying raspberry has two Rs or drawing a rabbit with too many ears. Yet they can serve as middleware for each other, with Worldcoin (now World) as a proof point where crypto identity becomes essential to distinguish humans from bots in an AI saturated world.

Ari walks through Crypto x AI applications where AI enhances crypto. He shows how a typical parametric flight insurance smart contract, while elegant, suffers from moral hazard and can't document actual harms, which is why AXA's Fizzy product was discontinued. By adding an LLM enhanced oracle, the same contract can ingest receipts and assess damages like real world insurance while preserving privacy. He covers AI powered investment funds, which IC3 calls coinouts (collective investment algorithms), and presents the fundamental coinout bind: either the strategy is transparent and gets front run publicly, or it's opaque and gets front run privately through covert channels. In the other direction (AI x Crypto), he addresses DePIN GPU networks with healthy skepticism, noting industry proofs of concept don't report communication or compute costs, and the largest decentralized trained model has only 40 billion parameters versus frontier models' trillions. He shows the same TEE plus LLM oracle pattern enabling confidential lending, whistleblower credentials, anonymous reviewer proofs, and code audits without revealing source. He closes with a warning about rogue agents (UAAS, unstoppable autonomous agents) that could use stablecoins to rent servers, establish censorship resistant command and control, conceal their code, and even rent humans through services like rentahuman.ai to influence the physical world.

00:00 Introduction
00:11 IC3 and the New Crypto AI Survey
00:37 Why Crypto and AI Are Not Natural Bedfellows
01:00 Crypto Is Hard: Programmatic and Unforgiving
01:52 The Kelp DAO Attack as Proof of Unforgivingness
02:41 Security Tools the Crypto Industry Has Pioneered
03:11 AI Is Soft: Unpredictable and Error Prone
04:24 World as a Proof Point of the Intersection
05:39 The Middleware Model for AI and Crypto
06:04 Crypto x AI: How AI Enhances Crypto
06:29 The Flight Insurance Smart Contract Example
07:07 Why Parametric Insurance Has Limitations
07:58 AXA's Fizzy Product and Why It Was Discontinued
07:58 Enhancing Oracles with LLMs
09:19 Hard Crypto Meets Soft AI Productively
10:02 AI Powered Investment Funds
10:36 Why First Wave AI Funds Were Mostly Hype
11:05 Coinouts: Collective Investment Algorithms
11:39 The Coinout Bind: Transparency vs Opacity
12:27 AI x Crypto: How Crypto Enhances AI
12:59 DePIN and Decentralized GPU Networks
13:50 Why DePIN Training Claims Need More Evidence
14:33 Confidential Lending with TEEs and LLMs
15:59 Other Use Cases: Whistleblowers and Anonymous Reviews
16:16 Pyred: Code Credentials Without Revealing Source
16:38 The Warning About Rogue Agents
17:05 How Stablecoins Enable Persistent Autonomous Agents
17:34 Renting Humans with Crypto
17:59 Other Topics Covered in the Survey
18:25 Five Myths and Misconceptions Debunked
18:57 Where to Read the Paper
18:57 Closing

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