By Isaac • October 1, 2026 11:11 pm •
Ethereum has put a new privacy experiment on mainnet, and it is aimed directly at one of the fastest-growing markets in technology: metered access to artificial intelligence and other APIs.
The system is called zkAPI. It was built by the Open Anonymity Project with the Ethereum Foundation, and its pitch is simple: a user should be able to pay for API usage without handing the provider a durable billing identity that connects every request into one long profile.
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That meaningfully changes the normal API-key model, but the word “private” needs a boundary. zkAPI breaks the link between payment and usage.
Request content, IP addresses, and other clues that can connect sessions remain visible outside that payment
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