TOKEN2049 Singapore recap: Zcash and StarkWare founders say AI, not just quantum, is coming for crypto's math

Zooko told the TOKEN2049 Singapore crowd that his team had raced AI to Zcash's own bugs, and only just won. They saw the AI threat coming around February, he said, hired the best person they could find and pointed the tools at their own code 1. "We found a bug in Zcash that would have destroyed it," Zooko said, and they fixed it before attackers could use it 1.

Now the team is doing the same thing for cryptography itself, he said 1. Quantum computers are part of the worry, but Zooko said AIs have "accelerated to the point at which we don't 100% know if they could break modern cryptography" 1. He told the room that the leading AI had announced 174 mathematical breakthroughs that same morning 1.

Eli Ben-Sasson, who co-wrote the Zerocash paper behind Zcash and co-founded StarkWare, made the same argument from the maths side 2. The slogan holds only with fine print: "your keys your coins provided the math underlying this remains hard" 2. He said a candidate post-quantum signature called Hawk was cracked by AI about three months earlier, and a code-based system considered safe for 50 years saw another crack about a month before his talk 2. His answer is hash-based cryptography 2. He also said that "if Ethereum is too slow to adopt, then Starknet will need to become an L1" 2.

Josh Swihart, CEO of Zcash Open Development Lab, the team formerly known as the Electric Coin Company, came at privacy from the other direction: he used to build surveillance 3. Before Zcash he worked on an intelligence system for a government, then on ad tech that built rich profiles of 30 million Americans from 26 sites, until his team shut it down 3. "Fundamentally, when we are watched, our behavior changes," he said, and "privacy is really about who we are when nobody is watching" 3.

Illia Polosukhin said NEAR's new exchange keeps balances and positions hidden by default: "everything you have in Near.com is private" 4. He described automations users set up in plain language, and said that because the assistant sees a user's whole portfolio, "this AI itself needs to be private as well" 4.

Jesse Pollak, the creator of Base, spent his slot on stocks 5. In 18 months, he said, "we've gone from basically zero to more than 3.3 billion dollars of tokenized equities" running on Base 5. He described them as real shares held by a regulated custodian and available around the clock in self-custody: "Now they're stock coins" 5.

TOKEN2049 Singapore ran Oct 7 and 8, and StreamETH has 99 of its 100 recordings transcribed ↗1. This recap draws on five of them; the archive also holds the panels on quantum and on Zcash's privacy case 67.