The crypto industry has spent years debating whether quantum computing poses an existential threat to blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Today, researchers and manufacturers believe that artificial intelligence could accelerate this time and force a broader rethinking of how digital security works.
Leaders working on post-quantum cryptography and blockchain security have described a rapidly evolving 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 cryptocurrency infrastructure.
“Between quantum and AI, we’re going to move into a world where security, and it goes broader than just cryptography, you just can’t rely on the way you’ve always done things,” Pruden said.
The convergence of AI and quantum computing has become increasingly urgent following warnings from big tech companies and researchers that cryptographically relevant quantum computers could arrive sooner than expected. While experts remain divided on exactly when a quantum computer capable of breaking modern encryption will emerge, many believe AI could significantly shorten development times.
“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 bottlenecks in this area.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and former Google AI researcher, said AI has already been accelerating scientific discovery for years.
“AI is increasingly becoming an accelerator,” Polosukhin said. “The pace of research will accelerate from here on out, and we’ve already seen progress that people didn’t expect so soon.”
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. “It feeds on itself.”
For security researchers, the threat is no longer merely theoretical. The growing concern is that governments and sophisticated actors are already harvesting encrypted internet traffic today in the hopes that future quantum computers will eventually be able to decrypt it, a strategy often called “harvest now, decrypt later.” “If I know that quantum computers are coming in a few years, I will start trying to capture all the possible data that is circulating,” Polosukhin said.
“Anything 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 probably already happening.”
The implications for cryptography are particularly serious, as most blockchain networks rely on the same elliptic curve cryptography used across the wider Internet. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could theoretically derive private keys from public keys, allowing attackers to compromise vulnerable wallets and systems.
But researchers are increasingly saying that the main issue is not just quantum, but rather the combination of quantum computing and AI that is creating an ongoing security arms race.
Artificial intelligence is already becoming increasingly effective at identifying software vulnerabilities and implementation flaws. “I would expect the advent of AI to accelerate… even more hacks,” Pruden said. “You have these AI models that can detect implementation bugs in the underlying cryptography or, increasingly, I think, break the cryptography itself.”
At the same time, developers are deploying AI defensively for code auditing, testing, and formal verification, mathematical techniques used to prove that software behaves as expected. “AI can help with formal verification of post-quantum systems,” Pruden said. “This makes them theoretically safer.”
The result, researchers say, is a future in which security can no longer be viewed as a static infrastructure upgraded every ten years. “Nothing will be as static as it has been in the future,” Pruden said. “Either a quantum computer comes online to break a fundamental assumption, or AI becomes smart enough to break that assumption as well.”
This shift is already starting to force blockchain networks to rethink how quickly they can scale. 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 crypto directly into its account infrastructure, allowing users to pivot crypto schemes without migrating assets to entirely new wallets. “In 2018, when we were designing [NEAR]we said, ‘Hey, quantum will come, we should have an easy way to do it,’” Polosukhin said.
However, the transition remains technically difficult. Post-quantum cryptographic systems are often significantly larger and slower than current standards. “Currently standardized cryptography for post-quantum is very large and slow,” Polosukhin said.
The broader implication, the researchers say, is that AI and quantum computing challenge a fundamental assumption of the digital age: that encryption remains reliable for long periods of time.
Instead, security could increasingly become an adaptive and ever-changing process, in which systems must constantly be upgraded to survive.
Read more: Here’s how Bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks are preparing for the looming quantum threat
