Opinion by: Steven Smith, head of protocol and applied research, Tools for Humanity

Blockchains were designed as systems of trust that are transparent, decentralized and accessible. The age of AI has, however, introduced significant new challenges. Nearly half of all internet traffic is generated by bots, with up to 80% of blockchain transactions now automated and AI agents accounting for most onchain activity. 

While some bots serve legitimate and helpful purposes, others — like those used for airdrop farming and fake account creation — clog networks, drive up fees, and monopolize space and resources.

It’s up to humans to protect the blockchains we know and love, ensuring that people aren’t unfairly disadvantaged by automated systems, insulated from the effect of maximal extractable value attacks and exploits, and free from the need to pay significant gas fees to be included in a block.

The bot takeover is already here

AI bots are becoming more integral to networks and capable of more sophisticated exploits, dominating trading volumes, driving up gas fees, and manipulating decentralized finance (DeFi) markets.

In some cases, networks have seen failure rates surge past 75% due to bot-induced congestion. Even Ethereum’s mempool is increasingly flooded with automated transactions, forcing human users to compete for scarce block space.

The problem extends beyond blockchain networks — it’s affecting the entire economy. AI-powered bots are set to disrupt traditional banking and financial services, threatening the very foundations of how money is managed and transactions are conducted.

It’s only a matter of time before bad actors begin deploying new AI-driven fraud tools at scale, creating an unprecedented security nightmare for financial institutions, businesses and users alike. 

This has already begun. AI-driven botnets fueled a 55% surge in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the banking and financial services industry during 2024.

If action isn’t taken, humans risk ceding control of both decentralized and traditional financial systems to automated systems optimized for speed and scale — not fairness or accessibility. 

Scalability alone won’t solve this problem

So far, the response to these issues has focused on scalability. Layer-2 solutions, rollups and high-performance execution clients make transactions faster and cheaper. 

Scaling without a focus on human users, however, leads to unintended consequences. Lower fees mean attackers can cause much grief for little cost, and bots can flood networks more easily. Meanwhile, faster transactions mean AI traders can outcompete human investors even faster.

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This has played out repeatedly already. A spam attack on Zcash severely disrupted its blockchain. During its token launch, Manta Network suffered a DDoS attack, slowing withdrawals and frustrating users. On Ethereum, bots have been used to manipulate gas prices during high-traffic periods, resulting in delayed transactions and higher transaction fees for real humans.

While scalability is critical, it’s equally important to prioritize another fundamental element of blockchain design: proof-of-human.

Proof-of-human infrastructure

Proof-of-human infrastructure is a mechanism that digitally verifies a person’s humanness and uniqueness. This is key to keeping control of blockchain systems in human hands, giving real people the power to ensure blockchains don’t become automated playgrounds for bots — especially as AI agents continue to scale. 

Proof-of-human systems ensure blockchain architecture evolves with a human-first approach. Networks should allocate guaranteed block space for verified human users, ensuring that automated trading bots don’t push out essential transactions.

Introducing gas subsidies for human users can also prevent them from being priced out during periods of extreme network congestion. Optimized execution clients can enhance efficiency while implementing safeguards against bot-driven spam. 

Blockchain architecture has made remarkable strides in scalability, interoperability and security. We also still need to ensure positive experiences for humans. As an industry, it’s fundamental to provide the ability to distinguish between real people and bots online to ensure the sector can continue to grow in the long run. 

The choice is ours. We can allow unproductive bots to take over our networks, pushing out human users and undermining the core promise of decentralization. Or, we can implement the necessary parameters to keep blockchains human-centric and ensure greater control over productive bots, ensuring fairer access, security and sustainability.

Now is the time to act. The future of blockchain and bringing more humans onchain depend on it.

Opinion by: Steven Smith, head of protocol and applied research, Tools for Humanity.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Ethereum’s Fusaka hard fork is expected to take place in the third or fourth quarter of this year, according to an Ethereum Foundation official.

In an April 28 X post, Ethereum Foundation co-executive director Tomasz Kajetan Stańczak said that the organization is aiming to deploy the Fusaka Ethereum network upgrade in Q3 or Q4 2025. Still, the exact rollout schedule has not been decided yet.

The comments come amid controversies over the upcoming implementation of the EVM object format (EOF) upgrade for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). As Stańczak pointed out, EOF is expected to be a part of the Fusaka network upgrade.

Source: Tomasz Kajetan Stańczak

The EVM is the software that runs Ethereum smart contracts. EOF would implement a series of protocol changes, known as Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs), with profound implications for how it operates. EOF introduces an extensible and versioned container format for the smart contract bytecode that is verified once at deployment, separating code and data for efficiency gains.

Related: Researcher proposes scaling Ethereum gas limit by 100x over 4 years

Wrap, stamp once, send

Bytecode is a low-level, compact set of instructions. Solidity smart contracts must be compiled into bytecode before the EVM can execute them.

EOF defines a container module for smart contract bytecode, replacing today’s free-form bytecode blobs with a better-defined structure. These objects would be composed of:

A header starting with the 0xEF00 hexadecimal value, followed by a one-byte version number to ensure upgradability.

A section table, providing metadata about the contents of the container. Each entry comprises one byte setting for the kind of entry and two bytes for the entry’s size.

Sections with the actual content, with at least one code section and any necessary data sections — more types of sections could be added through future EIPs.

This structure streamlines EVM operation, allowing for higher efficiency and lower processing overhead. This upgrade would result in a cleaner developer environment and easier-to-understand deployed smart contracts.

Don’t JUMP, RJUMP instead!

EIP-4200, one of the EOF EIPs, provides an alternative to the JUMP and JUMPI instructions, which allow the program to move execution to any arbitrary byte offset. This kind of execution chain leads to hard-to-spot bugs (the JUMP value being wrong in some instances may not be easy to predict) and makes it easy to hide malware in data blobs and move the execution pointer there.

This practice is known as dynamic jump, and EIP-4750 (under review) proposes disallowing dynamic JUMP/JUMPI inside EOF smart contracts, rejecting them entirely during a later phase of EOF deployment. In its current form, this EIP replaces them with call function (CALLF) and return from function (RETF) function calls. Those new instructions would ensure that destinations are hardcoded into the bytecode, but legacy pre-EOF smart contracts would be unaffected.

Developers who opt to use JUMP or JUMPI after the upgrade will have their bytecode go through deploy-time validation, which ensures that they can never jump into data or the middle of another instruction. This verification would take place via EIP-3670’s code-validation rules, plus the jump table (EIP-3690), so every destination is checked.

As an alternative to those functions, EOF implements RJUMP and RJUMPI instead, which require the destination to be hardcoded in the bytecode. Still, not everyone is on board with EOF implementation.

Related: Ethereum community members propose new fee structure for the app layer

EOF has its haters

EOF is the implementation of 12 EIPs with profound implications for how smart contract developers work. Its supporters argue that it is efficient, more elegant, and allows for easier upgrades down the line.

Still, its detractors argue that it is over-engineered and introduces further complexity into an already complex system such as Ethereum. Ethereum developer Pascal Caversaccio lamented in a March 13 Ethereum Magicians post that “EOF is extremely complex,” as it adds two new semantics and removes and adds over a dozen opcodes. Also, he argued that it is not necessary.

He said all the benefits could be introduced in “more piecemeal, less invasive updates.” He added that the legacy EVM would also need to be maintained, “probably indefinitely.”

Caversaccio also explained that EOF would require a tooling upgrade, which risks introducing new vulnerabilities due to its large attack surface. Also, he said, “EVM contracts get much more complicated due to headers,” while currently empty contracts weigh just 15 bytes. Another developer raised a separate point in the thread:

“Perhaps as a meta point, there seems to be disagreement about whether major EVM changes are desirable in general. A stable VM, on which people can invest in building up excellent tooling and apps with confidence, is much more valuable.“

Caversaccio appears to be in good company in his opposition to EOF. A dedicated poll on the Ethereum polling platform ETHPulse shows that 39 voters holding a total of nearly 17,745 Ether (ETH) are opposed to the upgrade. Only seven holders of under 300 ETH voted in favor.

Ethereum EOF implementation approval pool. Source: ETHPulse

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