Helius Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz has warned that crypto is entering a new security era in which AI, formal verification and higher software standards could separate serious infrastructure teams from fragile protocols. In a widely viewed post on X, he argued that crypto is “about to enter the space age,” with immutable financial code increasingly demanding the rigor of aerospace, chip manufacturing and other failure-intolerant industries.
Mumtaz’s central argument is that most software has historically tolerated a level of sloppiness that crypto can no longer afford. In conventional internet businesses, a bug may cause downtime, lost revenue or an embarrassing outage, but centralized operators can usually intervene, patch the system, roll back changes or compensate users. Crypto, he wrote, is structurally different because its core promise depends on irreversible execution in adversarial environments.
“Immutable financial code is akin to a spaceship leaving Earth that you have no further control over. It must work, or there will be catastrophe,” Mumtaz said. “This crisis has come up before. In the late 1960s, a NATO conference declared a ‘software crisis,’ as the software industry was getting increasingly sloppy and no one could really reason about these systems at scale.”
Crypto Must Reach Spaceflight-Level Security
He connected that earlier software crisis to the intellectual roots of formal verification, citing Edsger Dijkstra and the long-standing argument that testing can show the presence of bugs, but not their absence. For systems where correctness matters, Mumtaz said, software has to be treated less like an iterative consumer product and more like a mathematical object that can be reasoned about and proven.
That framing is especially relevant to crypto because blockchain systems handle billions of dollars in assets through code that is public, immutable and constantly probed by attackers. Mumtaz argued that the industry has often adopted the risk profile of aviation or spaceflight while retaining the development culture of web applications. In his words, crypto falls into the category of low-margin-of-error software industries, yet “most of the industry has been built using the sloppy standards of the former, human-intervenable systems.”
The Helius Labs CEO also took aim at what he described as the “facade of decentralization” that has softened the perceived urgency of the problem. Admin keys, controlled validator sets, social coordination and emergency interventions, he argued, have created a short-term sense of comfort. But those mechanisms also blur the distinction between genuinely autonomous systems and systems that can still be rescued by human operators when something breaks.
Mumtaz expects that distinction to become harder to ignore as AI improves. Rather than viewing AI only as a threat vector, he framed it as a force that will make rigorous software practices more accessible. Specification writing, proof assistance, symbolic reasoning, fuzzing, audits, invariant checking and formal verification workflows, he said, could become dramatically easier to use at scale.
“The silver lining is that AI will greatly streamline the process of formal verification and making programs more rigorous. What was once extremely manual and expensive will now become tractable at scale: specification writing, proof assistance, symbolic reasoning, fuzzing, audits, invariant checking, and formal verification workflows will all get dramatically more accessible,” he wrote. “This set of circumstances will lead to crypto reaching its ultimate potential, but I suspect only through trial by fire.”
That “trial by fire” is the crux of his warning. Mumtaz said an “aggressive natural selection mechanism” has already begun and may continue for several years. Strong teams, in his view, will emerge with more resilient systems, while weaker architectures will fail under higher security expectations and increasingly capable adversarial tooling.
He was careful not to frame those failures purely as malicious or negligent. “The serious teams will emerge stronger than ever, while straw houses will collapse,” Mumtaz wrote, adding that the latter should not necessarily be read as an insult because these systems are genuinely hard to build.
The broader implication is that crypto’s next competitive cycle may not be defined only by throughput, liquidity incentives or distribution, but by demonstrable correctness. Mumtaz’s end state is an industry where security, rigor and privacy become first-class concerns again, allowing crypto to become “demonstrably safer, more robust, and more Lindy than any centralized financial system.” His closing line was blunt: “I am long math and I am long crypto.”
The timing of Mert’s post is notable because it came just after Anthropic’s June 9 release of Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, a rollout that underscored how quickly AI is moving into offensive and defensive security research. Anthropic said Fable 5 is its most capable generally available model, but added safeguards around cybersecurity queries because the same capabilities could be misused; Mythos 5, the less-restricted version, is being limited at first to selected cyberdefenders and infrastructure providers through Project Glasswing in collaboration with the US government.
For DeFi, that is the uncomfortable part of the story. If models can increasingly reason through large codebases, identify subtle logic flaws and help turn vulnerabilities into working exploits, then public smart contracts become a natural target for AI-assisted bug hunting. Mumtaz’ “straw houses” warning is therefore not abstract: AI may sharply compress the time it takes both auditors and attackers to find the next broken invariant, unsafe assumption or exploitable edge case in crypto’s financial code.
At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $2.12 trillion.
