AI Ate Math’s Lunch, but $BTC’s Vault Is Still Locked 🔐

At the 2026 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), models from Huawei and Xiaohongshu scored a perfect 42 out of 42, a feat achieved by only seven of 666 human contestants, according to the official IMO results. Capriole Investments founder Charles Edwards, a member of BeInCrypto’s Market Intelligence Expert Council, made the claim on X on October 21: “This is a evolutionary turning point. The last month has been perhaps the first time AI has surpassed the best human intelligence in certain fields, like mathematics. Human intelligence is now no longer the apex predator.” Edwards described AI as the new apex predator and said almost no one seemed to notice.

In early October, OpenAI gave an unreleased model roughly 4,000 open problems. It returned 722 research manuscripts grouped into 372 families of results. Stefano Gogioso, CEO of Spooqy and a lecturer at the University of Oxford who is on BeInCrypto’s Future Tech and AI Experts Council, said: “Mathematical rigour is now free.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in July that the world is “now, like, in the singularity,” while Elon Musk told The Economist that AI could exceed humanity’s combined intelligence by around 2031.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva has warned that young job seekers face the greatest risk. Employment of 22- to 25-year-olds in highly AI-exposed jobs now sits 19% below its expected trend, per Stanford researchers, and that gap stood at 15% a year earlier. It stems from fewer hires rather than mass firings. US employers cited AI in 120,136 planned job cuts through September, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That is about 21% of all 2026 cuts.

The same development drew attention in the $ETH community and the wider crypto market. Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake argued that mathematical superintelligence had arrived and urged large holders to prepare for “bunker mode,” moving funds to never-used addresses. His concern was that AI-driven math could weaken $BTC wallet cryptography without a quantum computer; every address that has sent funds exposes its public key on-chain.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin advised against rushed migrations, while Coinbase cryptographer Yehuda Lindell dismissed the warning as alarm without evidence. There is so far no sign that the underlying cryptography has been broken. Edwards said the same AI systems still stumble on ordinary professional work.