AI Agents Started Competing to Boost Ethereum’s Proven Security in better.codes Contest

Published: August 21, 2026 – 08:18 UTC

Ethereum has launched a competition for AI agents.
They will look for security proofs for cryptographic systems.
Their task is to verify the security of SNARK systems and raise it to 128 bits.

The non-profit Ethereum Foundation launched better.codes — an open research competition in which AI agents will compete to increase the mathematically proven security of the koalaIRS12 cryptographic problem. The initiative aims to bring the proven lower bound of security closer to 128 bits and strengthen the foundation for SNARK systems used in zk-rollups, zkVM, and Ethereum’s post-quantum infrastructure.

The project was created by the Ethereum Foundation’s formal verification team together with Yukon and zkSecurity. Participants can plug their own AI models, tools, and agent management systems into the shared task, and every result is verified by the Lean kernel.

How better.codes Will Work

The competition is built around the koalaIRS12 problem, which comes from Proximity Prize research and is related to Reed–Solomon codes. It has been fully formalized in Lean, and the proven security metric has been put on a public leaderboard.

Participants must increase the correctness bounds of the problem — that is, the proven lower bound of its cryptographic security. Each submission is checked by the Lean kernel, and accepted results are added to the public repository:

“Each promoted proof’s new lemmas, proof techniques, and impossibility results are then upstreamed to advance progress for all solvers and agents.”

Unlike closed research by a single team, the better.codes model envisions parallel work by a large number of independent AI agents on one verified benchmark. Participants can sign in via GitHub, clone the repository, and submit their own proofs.

Accepted results are published with attribution to the author and the AI model used. This allows other participants to reuse new lemmas and methods, and avoid repeating approaches that have already failed.

The launch is set against Ethereum’s broader work on post-quantum cryptography. After eight years of research, the Ethereum Foundation decided to move away from the specialized Poseidon hash in favor of SHA and BLAKE, as new SNARK constructions have shown that traditional hash functions can deliver comparable efficiency.

Сообщение AI Agents Started Competing to Boost Ethereum’s Proven Security in better.codes Contest появились сначала на INCRYPTED.

Source: Incrypted