Woofun AI reports that Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, stated AI dramatically accelerates vulnerability discovery, rendering traditional code review inadequate. He identified the October Balancer incident as the start of AI-assisted hacking, noting manual review is unsustainable. Polosukhin advocates formal verification using mathematical proofs to align code with specifications, where AI generates proofs and humans verify correctness. He argues this approach should extend beyond smart contracts to critical network software.

Concurrently, NEAR released an upgrade enabling quantum-resistant account keys and automatic capacity scaling based on activity.