AI Is Breaking Into Blockchain Faster Than Developers Can Patch It
The same artificial intelligence revolution supercharging crypto development is quietly becoming its biggest security nightmare, and one of the industry's most prominent builders is sounding the alarm.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of the NEAR Protocol, delivered a stark warning this week: AI-assisted hacking is evolving at a pace that traditional code review simply cannot match. Speaking to The Block, Polosukhin argued that the standard security playbook, manual audits, peer reviews, and bug bounties, is becoming dangerously obsolete in an era where attackers can deploy sophisticated AI tools to probe smart contract vulnerabilities at machine speed.
"The threat model has fundamentally changed," Polosukhin said, pointing to the growing accessibility of AI coding tools that can be weaponized just as easily as they can be used to build.
### The Gap Between Attack and Defense Is Widening
The concern is not hypothetical. The DeFi ecosystem has already suffered billions in losses from smart contract exploits over the past several years, and those attacks were largely executed using conventional methods. The introduction of AI into a hacker's toolkit raises the ceiling on what is possible, and how fast it can happen.
Traditional code audits are time-consuming and expensive. Even the most thorough human review can miss edge cases buried deep within complex protocol logic. AI-powered attackers do not get tired, do not miss patterns, and can iterate on attack vectors in minutes rather than weeks.
Polosukhin's proposed solution is formal verification, a mathematical approach to proving that code behaves exactly as intended under all possible conditions. Unlike testing, which checks specific scenarios, formal verification aims to eliminate entire classes of bugs by design. It is a methodology long used in aerospace and critical infrastructure but has seen limited adoption in blockchain development due to its complexity and cost.
His argument is that the crypto industry can no longer afford to treat formal verification as optional.
### What This Means for Crypto Markets
For investors and traders, this conversation carries real weight. Security perception drives capital allocation across the DeFi landscape. Protocols that can credibly demonstrate hardened, formally verified codebases may attract institutional liquidity that currently sits on the sidelines, wary of smart contract risk.
Conversely, if AI-assisted exploits begin landing at higher frequency or larger scale, the fallout could trigger swift rotation out of DeFi-native tokens and into perceived safe havens like Bitcoin or stablecoins.
The builders who move first on formal verification infrastructure could define the next standard for trustworthy protocol development. That is not just a security story. It is a market positioning story, and the window to lead it may be narrowing fast.