AI Finds 70% of Smart Contract Exploits | Alpin Yukseloglu

Bankless

Tech News, Technology, News

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

AI is getting dangerously good at smart contract security. Faster than crypto is ready for. Alpin Yukseloglu joins Bankless to break down EVMBench (built with OpenAI), a benchmark testing whether AI agents can detect, patch, and exploit real fund-draining bugs and why the jump from ~12–13% exploit-finding to 70%+ could rewrite today’s security assumptions. We unpack what that “70%” really means, why crypto’s verifiability is an ideal training ground, why AI labs haven’t prioritized crypto data yet, and what a 24/7 blackhat vs whitehat AI arms race means for DeFi. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🪐GALAXY | INSTITUTIONAL DIGITAL FINANCE https://bankless.cc/galaxy-podcast ⚡ EUPHORIA | REAL-TIME ONE-TAP TRADING https://bankless.cc/euphoria 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix 🏅BITGET TRADFI | TRADE GOLD WITH USDT https://bankless.cc/bitget 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 AI’s exploit leap: 12% → 70% and the “Superhuman auditors” 7:02: Staring at the singularity without losing your mind 10:31 Agency » doom: the Thiel framing 19:10 What’s most at risk (and what’s safer) 23:37 What EVMBench actually is (benchmark + harness) 27:03 Why exploiting is the key: killing false positives 29:24 AI gets “good at crypto” fast: verifiability 30:56 What “70% exploit rate” really means 33:32 Why AI labs avoided crypto (it’s not technical) 43:38 Blackhat vs whitehat: how the race plays out 47:21 Agents and “payments at the speed of light” 51:02 EVM vs Solana: network effects 56:18 AI formal verification as an endgame 58:06 EVMBench V2: expanding the frontier 59:54 Why Alpin stays in crypto --- RESOURCES Alpin Yukseloglu https://x.com/0xalpo EVMBench https://paradigm.xyz/evmbench --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript

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0:00.0	Bankless Nation, we are here with Alpin Yuxolulu.
0:05.0	He is an investment and research partner at Paradigm.
0:08.0	Also the co-author of the paper titled EVM Bench, an OpenBench, an open benchmark for smart contract security agents written in collaboration with OpenAI to measure the ability of AI agents to just detect or patch or exploit smart contract vulnerabilities.
0:23.8	We're going to talk about the way that AI and AI capabilities are going to impact our crypto ecosystem, our smart contracts.
0:30.0	Alpin, welcome to bankless.
0:31.3	Hi, thanks for having me.
0:32.4	I want to start off the question with a very big question, this podcast with a very big question.
0:35.8	How at risk are we from AI? How large
0:39.9	of a threat does AI smart contract capabilities pose to our industry? Yeah, I mean, in the long term,
0:46.0	it's it's now increasingly clear that AI is going to be extremely, extremely good for crypto,
0:51.2	because especially on the security front, because we're going to get
0:54.7	to a world where, because everything is much more secure, the ceiling on the industry is much higher.
1:00.6	So our partner Matt talks about how, if you have a grocery store that's run by mom and pop,
1:06.4	because they can't see everything in the store, there's a limit to how big they can get.
1:10.1	But the moment you add security cameras in, so security has this effect of increasing the capacity, the carrying
1:15.5	capacity of an industry. I think in the short term, it's up to us because the models are getting
1:22.9	extremely good, like strikingly good. When we started working on EVM Bench, which is a benchmark
1:28.2	that consists entirely of fun-draining critical bugs around six months ago, the models were
1:34.9	able to find less than 20% of the bugs, like around 12 to 13%. And just over the course of while
1:42.7	we were working on the benchmark, this number went up to over 50%.
1:47.3	And in between when I drafted the launch tweet and when I had to actually hit send with the release of Jeep 5.3 Kodaks, it jumped up to over 70%.
1:57.6	So these things are just growing at a blistering pace, and it's very important that we
	...

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