Vitalik Buterin: traditional on-chain apps may fade as AI agents take over

Vitalik Buterin thinks the way people use Ethereum is about to change, and the change may not involve clicking buttons. The Ethereum co-founder suggested that traditional on-chain applications may decline as AI agents and bots increasingly handle transactions on the network within two years. Buterin laid out his thinking at the OKX Now 2026 Summit in Singapore on October 6, 2026. His core argument: AI could become the new user interface for on-chain activity. Instead of navigating an app, a user would tell an AI agent what they want. The agent would then carry out the task directly on the blockchain. He offered a personal example. Buterin said he updated his Ethereum Name Service (ENS) records in about five minutes by instructing a local AI agent, with no traditional user interface involved. ENS is the system that maps readable names to Ethereum addresses. Updating those records usually means opening a dedicated app, connecting a wallet and signing transactions. Buterin skipped all of that and just asked a machine to do it. Buterin did not explicitly declare that on-chain apps will vanish. His remarks instead pointed toward a future where AI mediates much of what users do on the bl...