POPA ReconEthereum Foundation and Open Anonymity launched zkAPI on the Ethereum mainnet: a way to pay for AI and other APIs so the service does not know who is paying
Ethereum Foundation (@ethereum)
zkAPI has no token, and $VVV and $PRXVT, with which it is confused, according to blvckvarcity, are other products. You deposit credits into the vault on Ethereum once, and a zero-knowledge proof issues a short API key with a limit, and the provider does not see which deposit pays for the requests. Only the payment identity is hidden, not the requests themselves and not the IP, and the protocol is still experimental, so an ordinary holder does not need to act.
Facts
According to the EF blog, zkAPI is already live on mainnet. This is a working version of the design by Davida Krapis and Vitalik Buterin, and the contracts, client and server were built by the Open Anonymity team.
The blog acknowledges two limitations: there is no network anonymity (a gateway can link requests from a persistent IP, Tor is advised), and repeated personal details and text style in requests allow sessions to be linked. [blog.ethereum.org, October 1, 2026]
The AggrNews feed reported the launch first with a link to the blog: October 1 at 19:16 UTC, about an hour before the EF post on X. [linked page, October 1, 2026]
Ethereum Foundation announced zkAPI on October 1: you deposit ether into the vault, sign a ZK proof and receive a fixed amount of private inference. [@ethereum, October 1, 2026]
According to The Block, the first use is AI chat and agents, later possible uses are RPC requests, image and video generation, VPN and payments between AI agents. In the project GitHub, the protocol is called experimental. [theblock.co, October 2, 2026]
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