Recently, Virtuals Protocol released a 1.5-minute video, in which Luna, as the representative, rushed towards Ethereum, and there was also a sculpture of Vitalik and another well-known image of Virtual, Aixbt, watching. Then Ethereum's official account forwarded the video, and the two parties announced the official start of cooperation. The Ethereum project IRIS, which was launched for the first time on Genesis Launches, is driven by AuditAgent, an AI-driven smart contract analysis tool developed by Nethermind, a company founded by Tomasz K. Stańczak, the current co-CEO of Ethereum Foundation.
What is IRIS? Who is Tomasz K. Stańczak? What impact might this have on Ethereum?
What is IRIS?
IRIS (Integrity & Risk Intelligence Scanner) is powered by AuditAgent, an experimental automated smart contract security platform launched by Nethermind. It is natively deployed on the X platform and is designed for Web3 builders. It can proactively scan developers' conversations and codes on social media, provide actionable security insights in real time, and discover potential risks and emerging needs, thereby helping developers complete audit pre-screening, learn security knowledge, and identify business opportunities in the environments they use most frequently.
Unlike traditional static tools, IRIS is based on an AI-driven intelligent agent framework, combined with Nethermind Security's professional capabilities and real audit data, to provide three core functions: AI-enhanced smart contract scanning, actionable vulnerability reporting and remediation suggestions, and real-time education on security best practices. It does not replace manual audits, but serves as an intelligent assistant in daily security processes, capable of completing basic scans in minutes, advanced analysis in 30-40 minutes, and in-depth research in 1.5 to 3 hours, greatly improving development efficiency and product security.
As an intelligent and evolving "security assistant", IRIS's strengths come from her understanding of real attack cases and audit patterns, her contextual awareness of code and social context, and her ability to access Nethermind's security research data stream, enabling her to keep up with the latest threats and provide high signal-to-noise ratio vulnerability identification. Her unique moat lies in the integration of proprietary vulnerability detection frameworks, multi-model AI orchestration systems, and native integration with social platforms, which has a clear lead in speed, accuracy, and practicality.
50% of the team's shares will be airdropped to the community and released linearly to the Ethereum community within 2 years, while the remaining 37.5% will be sold publicly at Gensis Launch, and 12.5% will be allocated to Virtual and Ethereum's trading pair liquidity.
It is worth noting that neither Nethermind nor members of the AuditAgent team have publicly stated that the project is related to the team itself, but Vader, the founder of VaderAI, the core project of Virtuals Protocol, said, "Close sources with the Nethermind executive team told me that they have been working on this agent for some time," and Wee Kee "everythingempt 0", the co-founder of Virtuals Protocol, bluntly stated that IRIS was jointly issued by Virtuals and Nethermind.
Vader believes that due to Tomasz K. Stańczak's " @tkstanczak " status in the Ethereum Foundation, he is not sure whether he will risk his reputation on this AI Agent project. But in any case, it can be confirmed that IRIS, as the first Ethereum project to launch Virtuals, has symbolic significance for both parties.
From dropout to EF Executive Director
Tomasz studied at Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) from 2004 to 2009, where he obtained a master's degree in information technology. At the same time, he studied business administration at Poznan University of Economics from 2005 to 2010. In the Polish education system, studying at two universities at the same time is not uncommon. But in his last year at Poznan University of Economics, he hardly attended any classes and certainly did not contribute to his thesis.
In fact, in the last year before graduating from Poznan University of Economics, Tomasz joined Itelligence (now known as NTT), a global IT service and consulting company founded in 1989 and headquartered in Bielefeld, Germany. At this time, Tomasz's job was to lead a small team to expand the application of the underwriting platform MRET for MunichRe (a German insurance company) to calculate premiums for large civil engineering projects. This was one of MunichRe's most important IT projects. Perhaps it was the busy work that caused him to have almost no time to complete his studies in his last year at the University of Poznan.
After training in Itelligence for a year and a half, Tomasz chose to join CME Group (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) to be responsible for the technical development of CME Direct trading platform. Just 6 months later, he switched to Citibank again. In the following 5 years, Tomasz was responsible for one team project after another, rising from technical director to VP.
A year after leaving Citi, in 2017 he founded Nethermind, a team that provides technology, R&D and consulting services for blockchain and DeFi businesses. Combined with his previous experience in traditional finance and consulting firms, this process seemed very reasonable.
Tomasz has established an efficient talent recruitment and training mechanism at Nethermind, creating a high-functioning team. They not only developed a high-performance Ethereum execution client, but also supported tools such as Sedge (a one-click deployment tool) and Warp (Solidity to Cairo translator), as well as Layer 2 solutions (such as Juno for Starknet). At the same time, the Nethermind team is deeply involved in key upgrades such as The Merge, Shapella, Dencun and Pectra.
Tomasz has also been actively participating in the Ethereum community since 2017. As an early member of the Flashbots team, he participated in the research of MEV and PBS, and then joined the board of directors of Ethereum Layer 2 StarkNet. He served as CEO of Twinstake, an institutional-level KYC provider. At the same time, the Nethermind team has gradually expanded to more than 330 members. He is deeply involved in the community and has expressed his views on the development of the Ethereum community in public many times, including EthCC, Devcon, X, and technical articles, which gives him a good appeal in the community.
Since the Trump administration took office, the blockchain model has been very different from before. The faction led by Vitalik advocates the "de-government" of Ethereum and advocates "cypherpunks", while the faction led by Joseph Lubin advocates supporting cooperation with traditional finance and enterprises to promote "compliance" to attract capital and promote mainstream adoption. At this time, Tomasz, who agrees with the decentralization and open source value of Ethereum and supports Ethereum's concepts of "global neutrality" and "trustlessness", and at the same time has considerable work experience and connections in traditional finance, and is very knowledgeable about technology, seems to be the only choice to mediate.
On March 17, 2025, Tomasz K. Stańczak officially became the co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, co-leading with Hsiao-Wei Wang.
What does the partnership with Virtuals mean for Ethereum?
On April 14, 2025, Tomasz, as the co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, shared a simplified roadmap for Ethereum on the social media X, clearly incorporating AI integration into long-term goals. Previously, he had mentioned many times in speeches and X that AI can be used as an entry point to attract thinkers and creative talents in the long term.
On March 12, 2025, Tomasz shared his vision for the future of Ethereum + AI at the Stanford AI Blockchain Summit. At this time, he had just been appointed as the co-CEO of Ethereum, but had not yet taken office.
Tomasz discusses AI + Blockchain at Stanford Blockchain AI Summit
In his speech, he talked about the usefulness of multi-agent AI, the evolution of blockchain governance, how to use AI to achieve smarter collective decision-making, Ethereum-related applications, and how AI's collective intelligence will enhance the collective decision-making ability of blockchain networks through data analysis and predictive models, reduce human intervention, and improve the scalability of decentralized systems.
Unlike Solana and Base, there are very few projects building AI products on Ethereum. Perhaps for this reason, Tomasz K. Stańczak co-founded Lantern Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm, with Gökhan and the Nethermind team on May 7, 2025. Lantern Capital focuses on supporting founders in developing next-generation applications and experiences that enable AI systems to effectively interact with blockchain technology.
Lantern Capital focuses on exploring how AI can achieve reliable collaboration on the blockchain, such as supporting the operation of AI agents through the Ethereum network. And improving the Agent Experience (AX) to optimize the user experience of AI agents in the blockchain environment. At the same time, ensure that the underlying blockchain infrastructure can reliably support dynamic AI use cases. Tomasz sees Ethereum as the core of this vision, emphasizing that the combination of AI and blockchain can create new decentralized application scenarios, such as the collaborative work of autonomous machines and smart contracts.
However, building a complete AI ecosystem on Ethereum from scratch is too time-consuming and costly. By connecting to the Virtuals protocol, Ethereum can directly introduce a mature token economic system, covering core functions such as the creation of AI agents, points mechanism, transactions and co-ownership, bringing new revenue models and interaction opportunities to users and developers.
The tokenization of Agent not only realizes revenue sharing, encourages more users to participate and build a new decentralized application ecosystem, but also feeds back to the entire Ethereum network through actual economic returns. With Virtuals, AI Agent becomes more composable and profitable on Ethereum, significantly expanding the innovation boundaries of DeFi, blockchain games, and the next generation of DApps, and further promoting the dual improvement of user participation and developer activity.
Can Ethereum's high liquidity, institutionalized risk-resistant system, and Virtuals' current powerful ecosystem make AI applications the new narrative for Ethereum in the next phase?
