Zcash's Eli Ben-Sasson: AI Is Crypto's Real Threat, Not Quantum

Eli Ben-Sasson wants crypto to stop staring at the horizon and check what's already at the door. The Zcash co-founder and computer scientist took to X with a warning that AI, not quantum computers, is the security threat the industry should be sweating right now. Quantum gets the headlines, he argued, but AI is moving faster and hitting sooner.

His reasoning is blunt: everything valuable in your digital life leans on cryptography. Keys, wallets, any app holding something you'd hate to lose. As AI tools get sharper, that cryptographic layer takes more punishment. Ben-Sasson said the surge in cyberattacks won't ease off while AI keeps getting stronger.

The warning lands weeks after a bruising breach at Binance, which saw roughly $6.3 billion drained from the exchange's hot wallets. Binance paused withdrawals while it dug into the incident, then reported clawing back about 95% of the affected assets. A nine-figure bill is one thing; the method is the part that worries security minds.

AI-driven hacking is already having a year. According to Google Threat Intelligence figures cited in the discussion, the monthly count of disclosed software vulnerabilities has nearly doubled over the past twelve months. That spike fits a simple theory: AI has become an efficient scanner for finding holes before anyone patches them.

Casa CSO Jameson Lopp made the case concrete, noting attackers can already lean on AI to automate the hunt for ordinary software bugs and weak spots in wallet firmware. His takeaway flips the usual conversation away from sci-fi scenarios and toward the boring vulnerabilities sitting in code deployed today.

Ben-Sasson's fix is stronger cryptographic standards, with a nod to hash-based approaches like ZK-STARKs. The message underneath: don't wait for a quantum breakthrough to harden your defenses when the tools hunting you are getting smarter every quarter.