Vitalik Buterin has identified "ZK Payments" as the next standard for payments at the protocol level in the agent era. He suggests that in AI-driven scenarios, persistent pseudonymous identities will eventually lose privacy. To address this, Buterin's team is developing a ZK API designed to isolate each request, ensuring privacy without necessitating an on-chain transaction for every action. This approach can be integrated with security deposits to mitigate potential abuse.