NEAR Co-Founder: AI-Powered Hacking Demands New Era of Code Verification
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of $NEAR Protocol, has issued a stark warning about the escalating threat of AI-powered hacking, stating that traditional code review methods are no longer sufficient to protect blockchain ecosystems. According to a report from The Block, Polosukhin noted that AI-driven attacks began to intensify significantly in October of last year, marking a turning point in the cybersecurity landscape. The Acceleration of AI-Driven Threats Polosukhin emphasized that the sophistication and speed of AI-generated attacks have outpaced manual code audits, which are often slow, expensive, and prone to human error. He argued that the industry must pivot toward formal verification — a mathematical approach to proving that code behaves exactly as intended — to keep pace with automated adversaries. Formal verification, while historically costly and computationally intensive, offers a level of certainty that traditional testing cannot match. Why Formal Verification Matters Now The $NEAR co-founder highlighted that the window for relying solely on human reviewers has closed. AI can now generate thousands of attack vectors in seconds, probing smart contracts and decentralized applications for vulnerabilities faster than any human team can respond. Polosukhin called for the integration of AI tools to make formal verification faster and cheaper, effectively using the same technology that