An AI-assisted audit revealed a bug in Zcash, contributing to Mumtaz’s argument about the vulnerabilities in crypto systems.
- Helius Labs co-founder and CEO Mert Mumtaz said the cryptocurrency industry needs aviation and spaceflight-like engineering standards.
- He forecasted a future of “aggressive natural selection” where stronger teams prevail, emphasizing it as a matter of knowledge.
- Following the bug discovery, Zcash experienced a flash crash but has since recovered, with positive retail sentiment around ZEC.
On Tuesday, Helius Labs co-founder and CEO Mert Mumtaz wrote an article on why AI will change blockchains, stating that the cryptocurrency industry must follow aviation, spaceflight, and chip manufacturing engineering standards.
Mumtaz differentiated between two kinds of software. The vast majority of the industry, he said, is built on the loose, patch-it-later standards of low-stakes systems like e-commerce, where the worst that can happen is downtime or a fixable bug.
Blockchains are in the other category, along with aerospace and chip production, where code controls money in a way that is “irreversible, adversarial, and immutable” and where one bug means catastrophic, irrecoverable loss.
“Immutable financial code is akin to a spaceship leaving Earth that you have no further control over,” he wrote. “It must work, or there will be [a] catastrophe.”
He traced the problem back to a 1960s NATO conference that announced a “software crisis” and referenced Edsger Dijkstra’s argument that testing shows the presence of bugs, but never their absence, meaning correctness must be mathematically proven, not patched.
The Illusion Of Comfort
In his view, crypto has blurred that line for years. Mumtaz said the “illusion of comfort” of mission-critical systems being silently intervenable through admin keys, controlled validator sets, and emergency interventions won’t last as AI progresses.
AI is going to make formal verification, which has historically been manual, expensive, and near impossible on real code, tractable at scale, streamlining specification writing, proof assistance, fuzzing, audits, and invariant checking, said Mumtaz.
A Reckoning For Sloppy Code
Mumtaz predicted a time of “aggressive natural selection,” in which the strong teams will get stronger, and the weak teams will fall apart. He framed it as a question of knowledge, not malice. “The end state,” he said, “more Lindy than any centralized financial system.” He finished, saying, “I am long math, and I am long crypto.”
Helius is a Solana-focused (SOL) infrastructure provider, offering RPC nodes, APIs, and developer tooling that power applications built on the Solana blockchain.
The post comes days after an AI-assisted audit uncovered a four-year-old bug in Zcash’s Orchard shielded pool, an episode Mumtaz has read as evidence of his thesis in action.
After the bug was discovered, Zcash saw a flash crash to $250 but has recovered to $461. ZEC’s price was up over 6% in the last 24 hours.
On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around ZEC remained in the ‘extremely bullish’ zone, while chatter stayed at ‘extremely high’ levels over the past day.
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