The crypto industry has been debating for years whether quantum computing poses an existential threat to blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, researchers and builders believe that artificial intelligence may be accelerating that timeline and forcing a broader rethinking of how digital security works.
Leaders working on post-quantum cryptography and blockchain security described a rapidly changing landscape in which AI is simultaneously becoming a weapon for attackers, a defensive tool for developers, and an accelerator of quantum computing research.
“The security landscape of the future will be different,” said Alex Pruden, CEO of Project Eleven, a company focused on quantum-resistant infrastructure for cryptocurrencies.
“Between quantum and AI, we’re going to enter a world where security, and this is more broadly than just cryptography, simply can’t rely on the way it’s always done things,” Pruden said.
The convergence of AI and quantum computing has become increasingly urgent following warnings from major technology companies and researchers that cryptographically relevant quantum computers may arrive sooner than expected. While experts remain divided over exactly when a quantum computer capable of breaking modern encryption will emerge, many believe AI could dramatically compress development timelines.
“AI is definitely being used to accelerate the development of quantum computing,” Pruden said. Researchers are already using machine learning systems to optimize quantum error correction, one of the biggest engineering hurdles in this field.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and former Google AI researcher, said AI has already been accelerating scientific discoveries for years.
“AI is increasingly becoming an accelerator,” Polosukhin said. “The pace of research will accelerate from here and we’ve already seen advances that people didn’t expect to come so early.”
Polosukhin highlighted his time at Google in 2016, when machine learning systems were already being used to discover new materials. “It could be that the next generation quantum computer will be built with AI and quantum computers of this generation,” he said. “He’s feeding himself.”
For security researchers, the threat is no longer simply theoretical. The growing concern is that governments and sophisticated actors are already collecting encrypted Internet traffic with the expectation that future quantum computers will eventually be able to decrypt it, a strategy often referred to as “harvest now, decrypt later.” “If I know that in a couple of years quantum computers are coming, I will start trying to capture all the possible data that is circulating,” Polosukhin said.
“Everything we put on the Internet, if you are identifiable as a person of interest, you can assume it will be decrypted in two years,” he added. “It’s most likely already happening.”
The implications for cryptocurrencies are especially serious because most blockchain networks are based on the same elliptic curve cryptography used on the broader Internet. In theory, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive private keys from public keys, allowing attackers to compromise vulnerable wallets and systems.
But researchers increasingly argue that the bigger story is not just quantum, but rather the combination of quantum computing and artificial intelligence that creates a permanent security arms race.
Artificial intelligence is already becoming increasingly effective at identifying vulnerabilities and software implementation flaws. “I would expect the advent of AI to accelerate… even more hacks,” Pruden said. “There are these AI models that are capable of finding implementation errors in the underlying cryptography or, I think, increasingly, breaking the cryptography itself.”
At the same time, developers are defensively deploying AI for code auditing, testing, and formal verification—mathematical techniques used to prove that software behaves as intended. “AI can help with formal verification of post-quantum systems,” Pruden said. “That, in theory, makes them safer.”
The result, researchers say, is a future in which security can no longer be treated as a static infrastructure that is updated once a decade. “Nothing is going to be as static as it has been in the future,” Pruden said. “Either a quantum computer is activated to break some fundamental assumption, or the AI becomes smart enough to break that assumption as well.”
That shift is already starting to force blockchain networks to rethink how quickly they can evolve. Several ecosystems, including Ethereum, Zcash, Solana, Ripple, and NEAR, are actively researching or implementing post-quantum migration strategies.
NEAR recently announced plans to integrate post-quantum cryptography directly into its account infrastructure, allowing users to rotate crypto schemes without migrating assets to entirely new wallets. “In 2018, when we were designing [NEAR]we thought, ‘Hey, quantum is coming, we should have an easy way to do it,’” Polosukhin said.
Still, the transition remains technically difficult. Post-quantum cryptographic systems are typically significantly larger and slower than current standards. “The cryptography that is currently standardized for post-quantum is very large and slow,” Polosukhin said.
The broader implication, according to the researchers, is that both AI and quantum computing are undermining a fundamental assumption of the digital age: that encryption remains reliable over long periods.
Instead, security may increasingly become an adaptive and continually evolving process, where systems must constantly be updated just to survive.
Read more: Here’s how bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks are preparing for the looming quantum threat
