Avalanche founder Emin Gün Sirer has cautioned that artificial intelligence could soon identify and exploit undiscovered security vulnerabilities within the XRP Ledger, raising fresh concerns over blockchain safety. Sirer, a respected computer scientist and entrepreneur known for his work in decentralized systems and consensus protocols, believes that the threat posed by AI-driven attacks on blockchain software may surpass worries about new breakthroughs in cryptography.
AI-driven vulnerabilities take center stage
Sirer suggested that the cryptocurrency industry’s current preoccupation with advances in cryptography overlooks a more immediate risk: the possibility that modern AI models could detect and exploit critical software bugs. These vulnerabilities, he argued, may be missed by human reviewers but discovered by increasingly sophisticated AI systems.
Expressing his view on social media platform X, Sirer said, “We will see AI exploiting system-level bugs long before ECDSA goes away.” He added that blockchain software, along with related libraries and crypto wallets, might harbor flaws that billions of dollars could be stolen from if found and leveraged by malicious actors using AI tools.
“If you believe, for instance, that Ripple’s (or put any other high-value, low-use chain here) under-scrutiny code has no 0-day bugs that are hard for humans to see but easy for AI to detect, you’re a deluded person,” Sirer stated.
A 0-day bug refers to a security vulnerability unknown to the software’s creators and not yet patched, providing a window in which attackers may compromise the system.
Despite his warnings, Sirer did not reveal any specific unaddressed vulnerabilities in the XRP Ledger or supply evidence of AI-enabled attacks. His remarks come as the XRP Ledger—an open-source blockchain launched by software engineers David Schwartz, Arthur Britto, and Jed McCaleb—faces increased scrutiny following an emergency software patch deployed on September 25.
Mini dictionary: XRP Ledger is a decentralized public blockchain focused on fast, low-cost payments, maintained by a global community of developers. Its codebase receives frequent updates to address performance or security concerns, and Ripple Labs is a key participant in its ecosystem.
XRP Ledger emergency update and industry response
The latest XRP Ledger update was issued to address a critical security issue. While developers initially withheld the source code for these security fixes, they pledged to publish it later alongside a technical review outlining the vulnerability and the process for patching it.
Tensions between Ripple, the company behind the cross-border payment network, and Sirer have escalated publicly, particularly after Sirer’s pointed criticisms of Ripple’s engagement with banking institutions drew a response from Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.
AI and cryptography: Debates among top blockchain leaders
Industry leaders have voiced differing opinions about the likelihood and impact of AI discovering vulnerabilities within cryptographic protocols. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, recently warned that AI-assisted mathematical discovery could target assumptions underlying lattice-based cryptography within two years.
Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, rejected Buterin’s projections, describing them as speculative and unsupported by existing mathematical evidence. Meanwhile, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake expressed caution regarding AI’s eventual capability to break the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), an essential standard for signing cryptocurrency transactions.
Sirer concurred that such cryptography risks cannot be entirely dismissed but recommended the crypto community focus on addressing current software security threats, emphasizing that real-world vulnerabilities could prove more urgent than hypothetical cryptographic breakthroughs.
Sirer argued that overlooking the risk of AI-exposed software bugs could lead to financial losses well before cryptographic defenses become obsolete.
