Recently, Virtuals Protocol released a 90-second video featuring Luna symbolically charging towards Ethereum, alongside a sculpture of Vitalik and another well-known Virtual character, Aixbt, observing the action. Shortly after, Ethereum's official account shared the video, and the two parties officially announced their collaboration. The first Ethereum project to launch on Genesis Launches, called I.R.I.S, is powered by AuditAgent, an AI-driven smart contract analysis tool developed by Nethermind, a company founded by Tomasz K. Stańczak, the current Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation.

What is I.R.I.S? And who is Tomasz K. Stańczak? What kind of impact might this have on Ethereum?

What is I.R.I.S?

I.R.I.S. (short for Integrity & Risk Intelligence Scanner) is an experimental automated smart contract security platform launched by Nethermind and powered by AuditAgent. Natively deployed on the X platform, it is tailored for Web3 builders. It actively scans developer discussions and code shared on social media, providing actionable security insights and identifying potential risks and emerging needs in real-time. This helps developers conduct pre-audit screening, enhance their security knowledge, and identify business opportunities in the environments they use most often.

Unlike traditional static tools, I.R.I.S. leverages an AI-driven agent framework combined with Nethermind Security's expertise and data from real audits. It offers three core functionalities: AI-enhanced smart contract scanning, actionable vulnerability reports with remediation recommendations, and real-time education on security best practices. It does not replace human audits but instead serves as an intelligent assistant in daily security workflows. I.R.I.S. can perform basic scans within minutes, advanced analyses in 30-40 minutes, and in-depth research within 1.5 to 3 hours, significantly improving development efficiency and product security.

As an intelligent and continuously evolving "security assistant," I.R.I.S.'s strengths lie in its understanding of real-world attack scenarios and audit patterns, its contextual awareness of code and social conversations, as well as its integration with Nethermind's security research data streams. These capabilities enable it to keep up with the latest threats and offer high signal-to-noise ratio vulnerability detection. I.R.I.S.'s unique competitive edge comes from its proprietary vulnerability detection framework, multi-model AI orchestration system, and native integration with social platforms, achieving clear advantages in speed, accuracy, and utility.

50% of the team's allocation will be airdropped to the community and released linearly over two years to the Ethereum community. The remaining 37.5% will be made available for public sale during the Genesis Launch, and the final 12.5% will be allocated to Virtual and as a liquidity pair for Ethereum trades.

It is noteworthy that neither members of the Nethermind nor the AuditAgent teams have openly declared that the project is connected to their organizations in any official capacity. However, Vader, the founder of VaderAI—the core project of Virtuals Protocol—stated that "a close source within the Nethermind executive team informed me that they have been working on this agent for some time." Additionally, Wee Kee, aka "everythingempt0," the co-founder of Virtuals Protocol, claimed outright that IRIS is a joint release by Virtuals and Nethermind.

Vader believes that due to Tomasz K. Stańczak's role within the Ethereum Foundation (@tkstanczak), it is uncertain whether he would risk his reputation on this AI Agent project. Regardless, IRIS, as the first Ethereum-based project launched by Virtuals, undeniably holds symbolic significance for both parties.

From College Dropout to Executive Director of EF

Between 2004 and 2009, Tomasz attended Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) and earned a master's degree in Information Technology. Simultaneously, from 2005 to 2010, he was also enrolled in the Business Management program at Poznan University of Economics. In Poland's education system, attending two universities at the same time is not uncommon. However, during his final year at Poznan University of Economics, Tomasz rarely attended classes and, ultimately, did not complete his thesis.

During his last year at Poznan University of Economics, Tomasz joined Itelligence (now known as NTT), a global IT services and consulting company founded in 1989 and based in Bielefeld, Germany. Tomasz's role involved leading a small team to extend the application platform MRET for MunichRe, a German insurance company. This platform was critical for calculating premiums for large-scale civil engineering projects and was one of MunichRe's most significant IT initiatives. His demanding work schedule might explain why he was unable to finalize his studies at Poznan University.

After spending a year and a half honing his skills at Itelligence, Tomasz chose to join CME Group, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where he took charge of the technical development of the CME Direct trading platform. Merely six months later, he transitioned to Citibank. Over the next five years, Tomasz led numerous team projects, climbing the ranks from Technical Director to Vice President.

In 2017, a year after leaving Citibank, he founded Nethermind, a team dedicated to providing technical, development, and consulting services for blockchain and DeFi businesses. Considering his extensive experience in traditional finance and consulting, this move seemed like a natural progression.

At Nethermind, Tomasz established an efficient talent acquisition and training mechanism, building a highly functional team. Not only has the team developed a high-performance Ethereum execution client, but they have also delivered tools such as Sedge (a one-click deployment tool) and Warp (a Solidity-to-Cairo transpiler). They’ve also worked on Layer 2 solutions like Juno for StarkNet. The Nethermind team has been deeply involved in critical upgrades such as The Merge, Shapella, Dencun, and Pectra.

Since 2017, Tomasz has been actively involved in the Ethereum community. As an early team member of Flashbots, he contributed to research on MEV and PBS. Later, he joined the board of Ethereum Layer 2 StarkNet and took on the role of CEO at Twinstake, an institutional-grade KYC provider. Concurrently, the Nethermind team grew to over 330 members, deeply engaging with the community. Tomasz has often shared his insights about Ethereum's development and his vision for the community through various platforms, including EthCC, Devcon, blog posts, and other technical contributions, earning him significant influence within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Since the Trump administration came into office, the blockchain landscape has undergone major shifts. On one hand, leaders like Vitalik have championed Ethereum's "de-governmentalization" ideals, adhering to "cypherpunk" values. On the other hand, Joseph Lubin has advocated for compliance and collaboration with traditional finance and enterprises to attract capital and drive mainstream adoption. The growing ideological split between their teams was evident. In this context, Tomasz, who strongly supports Ethereum's decentralization and open-source values while believing in its "global neutrality" and "trustless" ideals, seemed an ideal mediator. Equipped with robust technical expertise, extensive traditional finance experience, and a wide professional network, Tomasz stood out as the natural choice to bridge the divide.

On March 17, 2025, Tomasz K. Stańczak officially assumed the role of Co-Executive Director at the Ethereum Foundation, jointly leading alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang.

What Does the Partnership with Virtuals Mean for Ethereum?

On April 14, 2025, Tomasz, in his capacity as Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, shared Ethereum’s simplified roadmap on social media platform X, explicitly outlining the integration of AI as a long-term goal. He had previously mentioned in multiple talks and on X that AI can serve as a gateway to attract thinkers and creative talent in the long term.

On March 12, 2025, Tomasz shared his vision of Ethereum + AI at the Stanford AI + Blockchain Summit. At the time, he had just been appointed Ethereum's Co-Executive Director but had not yet formally taken office.

Tomasz discusses AI + Blockchain at the Stanford Blockchain AI Summit

In his talk, he discussed the utility of multi-agent AI, the evolution of blockchain governance, how AI can enable smarter collective decision-making, applications related to Ethereum, and how collective intelligence powered by AI could enhance blockchain networks’ decision-making capabilities through data analytics and predictive models, reduce human intervention, and improve the scalability of decentralized systems.

Unlike Solana and Base, projects focused on building AI products on Ethereum remain few and far between. Perhaps this is why, on May 7, 2025, Tomasz K. Stańczak co-founded Lantern Capital alongside Gökhan and the Nethermind team. Lantern Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm dedicated to supporting founders in developing next-generation applications and experiences that enable effective interaction between AI systems and blockchain technology.

Lantern Capital focuses on exploring how AI can achieve reliable collaboration on blockchains, such as running AI agents on the Ethereum network. It also emphasizes improving Agent Experience (AX) by optimizing the user experience of AI agents in blockchain environments, while ensuring that the underlying blockchain infrastructure reliably supports dynamic AI use cases. Tomasz sees Ethereum as central to this vision, emphasizing that the integration of AI and blockchain can create new decentralized application scenarios, such as the collaboration between autonomous machines and smart contracts.

Nevertheless, rebuilding a complete AI ecosystem from scratch on Ethereum entails an extended development cycle and high costs. By integrating with the Virtuals Protocol, Ethereum can directly adopt a mature token economy system, encompassing core functionalities such as AI agent creation, incentive mechanisms, trading, and shared ownership. This provides both users and developers with new revenue models and interactive opportunities.

The tokenization of Agents not only enables profit-sharing, incentivizing more users to participate and co-develop the emerging decentralized application ecosystem, but also provides economic returns that can ultimately give back to the Ethereum network. Leveraging Virtuals, AI Agents on Ethereum gain enhanced composability and profitability, significantly expanding the innovation boundaries of DeFi, blockchain gaming, and next-generation DApps. This fosters a dual uptick in both user engagement and developer activity.

Can Ethereum's highly liquid and institutionally resilient system, coupled with Virtuals' robust ecosystem, position AI applications as the next major narrative in Ethereum’s evolution?

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