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ZEC Artificial intelligence is reshaping the security of cryptocurrencies from both sides of attack and defense. Attackers use it to discover vulnerabilities faster, while defenders struggle to catch up. Traditional one-time smart contract audits, long the cornerstone of protocol security, are now in jeopardy.
One-time audits are no longer enough
Ari Redbord, director of policy at TRM Labs, is blunt: \"Our data suggests that ongoing reviews should be conducted, not one-time audits.\" He added,\"Attack technology has evolved far beyond what could be covered by an audit on the day of release.\" The warning comes as the entire industry is experiencing continued losses.
According to CertiK\'s \"Hack3d: First Half of 2026 Report\", a total of 344 security incidents occurred in cryptocurrency projects in the first half of 2026, resulting in losses of approximately US$1.32 billion. That figure looks better than it actually is-the total is lower than the $2.47 billion in the same period last year, but the comparison is distorted by a $1.45 billion Bybit hack in 2025. If this incident is excluded, the loss in 2026 will be significantly higher than the same period last year, indicating that the overall security environment has not improved.
TRM\'s own analysis found that the number of security incidents doubled from 83 to 207 in the first half of the year, setting the highest level in the middle of the TRM record. Among them, 125 cases of smart contract vulnerability exploitation occurred, accounting for 60%. One strategy used by attackers is to re-examine old codebases, and CertiK pointed out that their efforts \"likely benefited from improved automated tools that can identify latent vulnerabilities on a large scale.\"
A four-year-old Zcash vulnerability reveals risks
The risks in legacy code were exposed in a recent discovery by Zcash. A Shielded Labs security engineer using a custom audit agent built based on Anthropic\'s Claude Opus 4.8 discovered a major vulnerability. The vulnerability has been repaired. The four-year-old security breach could have allowed undetectable counterfeiting within Orchard\'s shielded pool, one of the network\'s key privacy features.
This issue was discovered through a custom audit agent built based on Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8. CertiK warned that \"the maximum vulnerability window will not close after release\" and urged projects running legacy infrastructure to \"view re-auditing as a regular operational requirement, rather than a one-time effort performed only at deployment time.\"
Currently, more than $72.3 billion in cryptocurrency is locked in hundreds of DeFi protocols, giving hackers sufficient incentive to attack outdated and under-censored code. The picture emerging is that artificial intelligence is compressing the time limit from when a vulnerability is introduced to when it is discovered-no matter who finds it first. For agreements that still rely on a single pre-release audit, the exposure risks are increasing.
