AI Summary
5 min read🎙️ The Voices & The Context
- The Format: Structured interview with a single guest, blending deep technical dives, philosophical tangents, and optimistic futurism, punctuated by sponsor breaks.
- The Key Players:
- Guest: Alpin Yupsalolu, investment and research partner at Paradigm, co-author of the EVM Bench paper with OpenAI. Famous for bridging AI labs and crypto, creating benchmarks that measure AI's smart contract security skills—timely as models explode in capability.
- Hosts: Bankless duo (Ryan leading), sharp crypto natives probing risks and opportunities with high-energy curiosity.
- The Vibe: Educational yet intense and hopeful—philosophical stares into the AI singularity, grounded by agency and crypto's verifiability edge. Fun "water cooler" tension between short-term exploits and long-term security utopia.
🗝️ Key Themes & Topics
The episode unpacks AI's double-edged sword for crypto: short-term risks from automated exploits vs. long-term boon via unbreakable security. Four core pillars emerge.
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Alpin Yupsalolu**
- 2 (00:36) **AI Threat to Smart Contracts**
- 3 (02:23) **Risk if Only Black Hats Have AI**
- 4 (06:55) **Superintelligent AI Risks**
- 5 (10:56) **Staying Sane Facing Singularity**
- 6 (18:36) **Most Vulnerable Smart Contracts**
- 7 (22:51) **EVM Bench Overview**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
AI is getting dangerously good at smart contract security. Faster than crypto is ready for. Alpin Yukseloglu joins Bankless to break down EVMBench (built with OpenAI), a benchmark testing whether AI agents can detect, patch, and exploit real fund-draining bugs and why the jump from ~12–13% exploit-finding to 70%+ could rewrite today’s security assumptions. We unpack what that “70%” really means, why crypto’s verifiability is an ideal training ground, why AI labs haven’t prioritized crypto data yet, and what a 24/7 blackhat vs whitehat AI arms race means for DeFi.
---
📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24
https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium
---
BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:
🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET
https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast
🪐GALAXY | INSTITUTIONAL DIGITAL FINANCE
https://bankless.cc/galaxy-podcast
⚡ EUPHORIA | REAL-TIME ONE-TAP TRADING
https://bankless.cc/euphoria
🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD
https://bankless.cc/brix
🏅BITGET TRADFI | TRADE GOLD WITH USDT
https://bankless.cc/bitget
🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS
https://thedefireport.io/bankless
---
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 AI’s exploit leap: 12% → 70% and the “Superhuman auditors”
7:02: Staring at the singularity without losing your mind
10:31 Agency » doom: the Thiel framing
19:10 What’s most at risk (and what’s safer)
23:37 What EVMBench actually is (benchmark + harness)
27:03 Why exploiting is the key: killing false positives
29:24 AI gets “good at crypto” fast: verifiability
30:56 What “70% exploit rate” really means
33:32 Why AI labs avoided crypto (it’s not technical)
43:38 Blackhat vs whitehat: how the race plays out
47:21 Agents and “payments at the speed of light”
51:02 EVM vs Solana: network effects
56:18 AI formal verification as an endgame
58:06 EVMBench V2: expanding the frontier
59:54 Why Alpin stays in crypto
---
RESOURCES
Alpin Yukseloglu
https://x.com/0xalpo
EVMBench
https://paradigm.xyz/evmb
More from this podcast
Bankless →