NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin issued a stark warning on Monday: AI-powered hacking is moving faster than the traditional code review process, making older security methods obsolete. He called formal verification – a mathematical approach to proving a program does exactly what it is supposed to do – the necessary next step for blockchain security.
Polosukhin’s comment lands at a time when generative AI tools can already write functional smart contracts, find exploits, and even craft attack payloads. Traditional audits, where humans manually read code line by line, simply cannot keep pace with the speed and scale of AI-generated attacks, he argued.
Formal verification is not new. It has long been used in aerospace, defense, and financial software where bugs are unacceptable. But the overhead is high: writing formal specifications for a single smart contract can take weeks. Polosukhin acknowledged the cost but said the trade-off is shifting as AI-driven threats multiply.
“With AI-assisted hacking, the attacker can generate thousands of variants of an exploit in seconds,” Polosukhin said in an interview with The Block. “A human reviewer might catch one pattern, but not the variations. Formal verification gives you a guarantee, not just a guess.”
The warning carries particular weight for blockchain projects, where a single code flaw can drain millions in seconds. NEAR itself uses a Rust-based smart contract platform and has invested in formal verification tools for its ecosystem, but the broader industry still relies heavily on manual audits.
For traders and developers, the shift means a growing premium on chains and dApps that adopt rigorous formal methods – and a rising risk for those that do not. The next catalyst to watch: whether major DeFi protocols begin mandating formal verification in their security standards.
NEAR co-founder warns AI hacking is outpacing reviews, risking blockchain funds
NEAR co-founder Polosukhin emphasizes the importance of formal verification to protect blockchain code from advanced AI-powered hacking techniques. This reflects growing concerns about AI threats to blockchain security.