In October 2026, at the OKX NOW conference in Singapore, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated: any vulnerable system will sooner or later be cracked by artificial intelligence. GPT-7, Claude 7 and DeepSeek 7 will find it, as the existing examples of attacks and breaches already show.
According to him, AI simultaneously strengthens both attackers and defenders. It helps Ethereum find bugs in the protocol, reproduce vulnerabilities and implement complex cryptography through formal verification. What used to be optional — audits and tests — is now turning into a mandatory requirement.
For cryptocurrency holders, this means a shift in the very logic of trust. If previously one could rely on a project's reputation or occasional checks, now vulnerabilities will be found automatically and quickly. Projects without mathematically proven security risk losing investors' funds within days of discovery.
The hidden incentives here are obvious: developers who do not invest in formal verification save today but pay tomorrow with their reputation and capital outflow. Those who adopt strict standards gain a competitive advantage in the eyes of users for whom the safety of their savings matters more than the speed of development.
Imagine a bank vault: previously a sturdy lock and an alarm system were enough, but now any microcrack in the structure will be detected by an intelligent scanner. In the world of blockchain, AI becomes such a scanner, and formal verification is no longer a luxury but a foundation.
Thus, the transition to mandatory security changes not only the technical side but also the psychology of owning digital assets: investors are beginning to value provable resilience above potential returns.
