Zcash (ZEC) co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson has warned that fast-improving artificial intelligence could strain the cryptography protecting cryptocurrency wallets before quantum computers emerge as the greater danger. In a post published on X, he set out the concern as a forward-looking risk assessment rather than a breach that anyone has confirmed.

Ben-Sasson is a longtime figure in applied cryptography. A computer science professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, he co-authored foundational research on zk-SNARKs (zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge) and went on to co-found StarkWare Industries, a company that applies related proof systems to blockchain scaling. He was also among the founding contributors of the Zcash project, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency launched in October 2016. That combination of roles gives his remarks a vantage point spanning both the privacy payments built on zk-SNARKs and the blockchain scaling infrastructure that applies related proof systems.

For Zcash, the warning lands at the core of the network's design. Its shielded transactions rely on zk-SNARKs to prove that payments are valid without revealing the sender, the recipient, or the amount, placing cryptographic key security at the center of the network's core functionality and its ZEC token. Because control of cryptocurrency funds ultimately depends on the security of private keys, questions about the long-term durability of the schemes protecting them extend well beyond a single network, touching wallet providers, exchanges, and developers across the industry.

The remarks fit into a long-running debate in cryptography. Security researchers have cautioned for years that sufficiently powerful quantum computers running Shor's algorithm could, in principle, break the elliptic-curve and RSA-based algorithms that protect most digital communications today, including the public-key schemes securing cryptocurrency wallets. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024, and parts of the blockchain industry have begun assessing quantum-resistant signature schemes. How quickly those assessments move from research into deployed wallet cryptography is one of the developments to watch as AI capabilities continue to improve.

Ben-Sasson's warning does not describe a confirmed exploit or an attack on any specific wallet, exchange, or blockchain. Rather, it positions advances in AI as a potential source of pressure on existing cryptography on a timeline that could precede the arrival of quantum computers capable of breaking current key schemes.

This content was first published on COINOTAG