Ethereum and AI: Building Autonomous Agents on Smart Contract Platforms
Ethereum's programmable smart contracts made it the natural home for decentralized finance, NFTs, and now a growing wave of AI-powered autonomous agents. These agents are software entities that can hold a wallet, interact with smart contracts, and make decisions with minimal human oversight, effectively giving artificial intelligence a way to participate directly in on-chain activity. At a basic level, an autonomous agent on Ethereum might monitor a set of DeFi protocols and automatically move funds to capture better yields. More advanced agents combine large language models with on-chain tools, allowing them to interpret natural language instructions, plan a sequence of actions, and execute smart contract calls to carry out tasks like swapping tokens, minting NFTs, or voting in a decentralized autonomous organization. Several technical building blocks make this possible. Account abstraction, an upgrade path within the Ethereum ecosystem, simplifies how agents can manage transact...