AI Finds 70% of Smart Contract Exploits | Alpin Yukseloglu

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.

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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

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RESOURCES

Alpin Yukseloglu
https://x.com/0xalpo

EVMBench
https://paradigm.xyz/evmbench

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures