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A
Hey everyone, I'm Cain Warrick and welcome to Uneasy Money. Because what happens on Chain never stays on chain. Before we begin, here is a word from sponsors that make the show possible.
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Multichain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create 50+ billion dollars in enterprise value for 80+ clients over the past four years. They're the partner to help navigate markets, build real traction today@multichain adv.com.
A
hey guys. I'm here with my co host, Taylor Monahan, security expert and Luca Netz, the CEO of Pudgy Penguins. And today we're joined by a special guest, Kelsey Nabin, research fellow at RMIT and author of the new book Decentralized Digital Security Code Community Crisis. It's out this year and it's open access courtesy of the Ethereum foundation, selling all its ethical to a good cause. All right, Podcasts are smarter than you and I. Look at that. I know. Yeah, we must be doing something right because we're getting some smart people on here. So it's good.
C
I love this.
A
So our first segment, we should just have like a rolling AAVE segment. It's just always a. The first.
C
We need like, like the. The theme music. Right. This is our A update section.
A
Yeah, literally. And now for more A news. So A is in the midst of this. And I mean, you could. You could argue that maybe it's not even A. It's like slightly. A. Slightly A bunch of other people, I would say not necessarily directly A. But you know, obviously the. The problem. Proximate cause of this is is. Is a. So there is a $71 million court order that is basically fighting over the recovered help DA hack funds that Arbitrum Resto White White stole. I don't know what.
C
Immobilized. They immobilized.
A
Immobilized. Okay. So. So yeah, there's. There is now a group of lawyers and. And I think maybe you have a better sense of these guys than I do. Hey, like, are they like, good guys? Are they like lawyer scammers? Like what. Like where on the spectrum do these guys fall?
C
I would put them firmly in the scheme. Scammy lawyers. I think this is. So these guys have been around for a while.
D
Actually.
C
They are the same guys who sued Pool together back in 2021 with the.
A
Oh, God, that's Okay.
C
Wow.
A
Crazy.
C
They. Yeah. So for those that don't know, the Pool Together lawsuit was a wild one with basically like an Elizabeth Warren staffer who didn't even lose because it was Pool Together but put in $200. And then this lawsuit came from that and it was all these are. Anyways, they lost, they lost the case. They did some other like DOW ones. They went, I think maybe like bcx, there's something on Lido. It. They have not had much success however, in the last, let's say like six months or so, they have collected up every victim who has a judgment against North Korea or Iran. They have collected them all and they have filed those judgments in New York in SDNY jurisdiction and right now one
A
of the VATS jurisdictions, so, and so
C
basically for those who are not like super legal and stuff, these people have superior sued literally North Korea or literally Iran for damages. And these damages stem from harm that has befallen them or their family members specifically, like their families were murdered by these regimes. And so they have sued them and then they've gotten a court to issue a judgment. These are default judgments because obviously these regimes did not actually show up to defend themselves.
A
North Korea didn't show up to New York to make their case. How, how strange.
C
So basically now all of these people have this open claim to North Korean or Iran funds. And so like they're owed this money and it actually makes sense. Like if you were to have like an ex or a business partner or whoever that wronged you, you can sue them, you can get a judgment against them. They have to pay you back. If they can't pay you back, you have various ways to like collect on your like what's owed to you. These guys have decided that they are owed the money that Arbitrum, the Arbitrum Security Council immobilized. They've also, they filed stuff against Circle, they filed stuff against Tether. They're currently fighting the actual US Government for some funds that they've frozen and had like were they were in the process of being forfeited to be returned to hdx. They're fighting those, they're saying those. That's their money too. So yeah, they're pieces of work. And I, in my opinion lawyers like this operate for money and money alone. They're hoping that they can make all these novel claims and in the end if their victims get any of this money, they're going to be taken like 10, 20% off the top at minimum. Right. So that's why these lawyers operate like this. Whether or not they can is well.
A
So, so there's two questions in my mind. One is like, is there definitive proof that it was even North Korea yet? Like these, these are always somewhat like speculative, like it's not like they've claimed North Korea hasn't come out and said, like, that was us. Right. That's not, that's not how they work.
C
They actually came out and said, this is not us. In response to TRM's blog post.
A
Wow.
C
They called, they called. They called the accusations being made against them for the cyber heist. They called, like the journalists in the media, they called them reptile organs. These are all lies perpetuated by the reptile organ journalists.
A
Wow.
C
Classic. Really?
A
I like that. That's a good, that's a good little barb. I might use that.
C
Definitely.
A
So, so they're. So they're denied. So like the, like clearly, right, there would need to be some ability to prove that the hacker was North Korea for this to even make sense. And you don't have that definitive proof.
D
I think Zach XBT was annoyed about it on X because he was quoted in terms of his open source research, was quoted in some of the court documents, but obviously he's done that, you know, as a blockchain sleuth, like an unpaid volunteer researcher. And also he was on the Security Council that froze the funds. So that there's one question about are they actually DPRK funds? And then another one about, well, if they're not DPRK and who are they? Because, you know, we'll get to the AAVE claims about not your money.
A
Yes. Yeah.
C
So, so, so yeah, the first part, the very first part is like, whether or not it's dprk, these things are always hard. And the reality is, like, most of the intelligence that exists for these hacks is like national security secrets. So like, even sometimes if I do get that information during the course of an investigation, like, I shouldn't know it, I don't have it. You know what I mean? But in terms of like the hard evidence, like, it doesn't, it doesn't exist in the public sphere in, in this regard.
D
There's been no, no post, Post mortem from layer zero. Right.
C
They did like a post. And they, they, they've said that it's probably North Korea, which is like one of the things that they've cited. But again, like, I mean, honestly, if there's any, if there's ever a big cryptocurrency hack that's not a smart contract exploit, like, it's probably DPRK just by the numbers. So it's hard to like say, I don't know, it's, it's tough for me to say that.
A
Like, it's not better. Yeah, wash that type of money, right? Like they own the banking rails and they're like stoked to actually wash it through their foreign.
C
Yeah, yeah. And then the second question though is like, and this is the one that just morally and like in my soul I feel like very strongly about is like, even if North Korea stole this money, that doesn't make it their money. They stole that shit from us, like from the Aubrey users, from the helped out from everyone involved here, right? Like they took that money by force. That doesn't make it yours. If I go rob a fricking bank, if I rob Ukain by show up in your house and take all your stuff, like, that doesn't mean it's not my property, it's still yours. You know what I mean? I just have like temporary illegitimate like possession of it. Right? And so that's, I think the, the stronger argument here is going to be like, just because they stole it doesn't make it theirs and doesn't put us into this like claim state where lawyers can now bicker over like, but like
A
it, it opens the door, right? And this is, this is kind of the fundamental, you know, like the lesson is never try sort of thing, right. Like, I think, you know, the, the one of the arguments, and I don't think it's like the soundest argument ever, but one of the arguments that, that, you know, historically a lot of teams have made is if we start doing stuff, yes, stop bad things from happening, other things might happen and therefore, and like, genuinely this is a hilarious outcome because like, it's both like frivolous, but also it is stuff happening because someone did something, right? Like it's like directly related to that and, and you know, so like it just. There's unintended consequences of you taking action that, you know, there are unintended consequences of you not taking action. But no one comes and bothers you, like, typically, right. Like you can, you can sort of like sidestep it and, and nothing, nothing really happens. So, you know, now it's like, oh no, these people took action and it's really easy. You know, there's a bunch of articles about like this Dao did a thing like no one, you know, there's, there's not like uncertainty as to who was involved in this. Right? And so, you know, you become the target of any person who's like, I would like $70 million.
C
Yeah. And I'd also argue that. So to me this is actually still like where we're at. Like, it's a pain in the butt. These lawyers Showing up, claiming it's their funds. Pain in the butt. It sucks. Don't get me wrong. I actually don't think there's a huge amount of legal risk, and I don't think that DeFi should like, change its operating behavior based on, like, specifically this lawsuit. That doesn't mean that there's no legal risk. There is so much legal risk in everything right now. But this lawsuit is like the very bottom of the barrel. It 100% like, yeah, you can also get sued. It's not a super strong case, but you can get sued for not taking action. Right? But also in this specific case, you have so many involved parties. You have Layer Zero, you have Caldao, you have Arbitrum Dao, Arbitrum Security Council, Off Chain Labs, AAVE llc, AAVE Labs, a dao Random AAVE users, AAVE whales, right? Like you have this whole mass of people, theoretically any of them could sue any of the other people and try to like, claim that, that whoever they were suing caused them harm and try to collect on that. Whether or not they'll be successful. It's like a whole other question. But, like, they could do that. And I think that those. I think there is legal risk there. All that said, this lawsuit is like below that legal risk, above that legal risk is the fact that if you can do something like Lazarus can hack you, period, end a conversation, right? Like, if you have, if there's keys, if there's admin functionality, if there's servers, these things exist. Your biggest number one risk is that Lazarus comes in and steals all the money, not just the $71 million.
A
So step one is don't have the money.
C
Don't have. Don't have. Yeah, don't have the money. Don't have a. Whatever. A DVN with a one on one. Don't have a EOA with a one on one.
D
But it's such an interesting question about whether anyone ever should do anything or not, right? Like the actual blockchain security landscape, there's people coming out saying, this is what happens when you have a Security Council. You know, like, stuff will happen and then you'll get tracked down. And like Kane, you mentioned the book, which kind of documents, you know, for the first time that I'm aware of, because it was, as it was emerging, this like, ad hoc, quasi, like, vigilantisocial layer of security that's kind of come about in parallel to the economic security of crypto economic protocols that we know. And, you know, this is the stuff that Tay talks about all the time. Because she's like one of those people in.
A
She's one of the vigilantes.
D
Yeah. In still 911, the people like, you know, monitoring the channels 24 7, you know, as volunteers to, you know, in the. In the name of this, like, kind of code of moral good. And I think that makes a lot of people really uncomfortable in these kind of deeper questions about decentralized networks, because, you know, what came through really clearly is that there is this, you know, white hat hacker, like, you're fine, do whatever you want and, like, make heaps of money and do crypto stuff, like, until you do harm to others. So you can't actually break in and steal my stuff while everyone stands by and watches if there's an ability to do something. But then that's making people quite uncomfortable because it raises all these questions about, like, who does what and, you know, what's, you know, endogenously governed? Like, what do we get to govern as a blockchain industry amongst ourselves? And then what happens externally where, you know, legal systems and things apply.
C
All excellent questions. Such good questions.
A
So, yeah, what. What. What are. What are we doing here, Tay?
C
I don't. Dude, I'm. Okay. So I think my, like, oldest adage that actually has never failed me is that instead of getting, like, too into the weeds on, like, all these theoretical things, just take the situation that you have today and look at it and be like, okay, can we do something about this? And if the answer is yes, then you. You should. And if the answer is no, then, well, you can't, so you shouldn't. And I think that people get really deep into the weeds on theoreticals and, like, what if this and what if that? But the reality is, is, like, every single situation is. Is different. I think a lot of people assume now that, like, oh, since the Security Council did this thing, they can now do this for everything else, or why didn't they do that for everything else? I'm not going to sit here and, like, say that they can or can't. Like, technically, it's just. It's really hard. Right. And so if another situation comes up where the Security Council is asked to do something, the answer, like, the first question they have to ask is like, can they actually do this? And in most, if not, like, yeah, I would say in the vast, vast majority of cases, the answer is going to be no. Right? Because the money is moving, because there's no way to enact the thing, because. Because there's uncertainty around what the hell even happened on. And on and on. You just simply can't get the group of people, which is a very large group of people actually together to like take this action. In other cases, though, it is much easier. And I think a lot of people choose to like, lie about what actions they can take realistically and choose to say, oh, we're decentralized, when in fact they're not. And so I think that's. Again, I think I've said this before in my head every single time I go to a team or I go to a protocol and I'm asking these questions in my head, it's a win win, because either they literally actually can't, in which case they're in a better position security wise and they won't pop up on my radar because they got hacked by Lazarus in the future, or they can and then they do and then they deal with the fallout and become more. Usually they become more secure as a result. Right. And there's like a sliver of people who, who deny that they can do anything, even though, you know, even though that they, they really could. And those people are the ones that I sort of write off in my head because they're actually the ones that are typically not great builders, not great at making decisions, especially hard decisions, and usually not secure because they're not honest with themselves or others about what their protocol actually is, where the controls are. They just don't have a good lay of the land. And that's like prime time. That's like the best dessert for Lazarus to come in, right? If you don't have good eyes on your servers, on your keys, on your people, they're just going to, they're going to go to town on you sooner rather than later.
A
Awesome. There were, there were a couple of interesting takes. Lexnode Gabe Shapiro had had what I thought was a pretty interesting legal take, as he usually does, that it wasn't that this is the hack, the original hack, right? That it wasn't a smash and grab. The exploiter forged a cross chain message minted, unbacked RS eth and used it as collateral to borrow eth from AAVE protocol in an arm's length transaction. And this is always super interesting to me when you try and apply the world to defi and get some weird result that you weren't expecting and you're like, oh, that's not how the code works. Surely it must be this person. And so the conclusion from that was like the exploiter acquired title defrauded. The lender's remedy is against the exploiter not abe.
C
Yeah.
A
Which is like, a very interesting conclusion. Right. You know, and I think, like, to kind of take it one step further, it's like the lender used AAVE as it is, but without the intention of repaying. Right. Like using, like, you know, false collateral or something. Right. Like, the. The AAVE protocol didn't realize that this eth was not real eth when or rst was not real rs, that it was unbacked. And. And therefore, like, AAVE kind of did the right thing, but these guys tricked AAVE into letting them borrow. Borrow the eat.
D
So, yeah, so AAVE should sue dprk, get a court order, and then make a claim on the frozen funds.
C
But it gets more complicated because. And this came up in court this morning, the very first question the court asked is like, ave, who the hell are you guys? And why are you in my fricking courtroom? Because you literally don't have these assets. Like, the assets in AAVE are not your assets. You don't have control of them. You cannot credit or debit or change or hold or pause. Like, you can't do anything. These aren't your assets. Why are you in my courtroom claiming that you're, like, an interested party? Right. Because that's, like the. The. The baseline to be able to, like, fight this in court is that, like, an interested party, someone who has an interest in this property comes forward. I think that was, like, definitely the Gerstein, the scummy lawyers, they were going hard on this. They're like, aave's just like a random company. They have no interest. Luckily, AAVE argued. It was a good argument. Argued that they're an interested party because this is their platform, this is their business. This is what they do. What their employees do, what their partners do, is they build this thing. Just because they don't have literal custody of the assets doesn't mean that they aren't impacted by these assets being stolen in the first place, being used in the course of a robbery. And then obviously, the assets that are now frozen on Arbitram, like, they have an interest in them. And I think that the judges. My read of it was the judge was accepting of that as, like, standing. And then. Yeah, the second part of it was, God, this poor judge. That's all I'll say. You have these two lawyers show up in your courtroom at, like, early as heck in the morning, and they're explaining what's actually quite a complex series of events. Right. It was a forged message in layer 0 that allowed the attacker to withdraw the RS ETH. The attacker then took that RSE, bridged it to arbitrum, and then put it in AAVE to withdraw real eth on Arbitrum.
A
And.
C
And then this other random party froze some of the funds. That's why they're, like, in court. Right. And that conceptually, you could tell right off the bat that the judge was like, God help me.
A
Why? Literally, why? Like, why is this happening? Why. Why did you guys do this? Why. Why did you enable whatever this nonsense is? Yeah.
C
And so that was. She had one good analogy. I always like Normie's analogy. She had one good analogy where she said, okay, so if you're. If you're at a party, right, you're at, like, a party, and you notice, like, this other party person checked their really nice, fancy, like, expensive fur coat into the coat check. Right. If you were to go and steal their coat check ticket out of their pocket and go take their coat for your own, is that theft or is that fraud? Meaning? Because the whole legal question is if. If. If it's like, a good faith loan, the title transfers, or if it's like a good faith purchase, the title transfers, but if it's soft, it's soft, so the title doesn't transfer. That's why this is relevant. So, yeah, that was her analogy. And, like, my answer to that is, like, obviously not. Like, that doesn't give the thief, the pro, like, ownership of the fur coat. That's ridiculous. There's some other good analogy. She, like, compared to, like, the na. Like, she kind of compared AAVE to being the NASDAQ as, like, even though the NASDAQ doesn't necessarily, like, literally have people's money, if something were to happen to, like, a core part of their system, they would be interested and be impacted.
D
So.
A
Right. Like, there's a lot of. They're the venue under which the, you know, transaction is happening. Yeah. I should say that the take from Gabe was actually Claude's take. Not. Not Gabe's take. But. But I will also say this. If you ask Claude a question and then post it on Twitter, you own the response to that question.
C
Yeah.
A
So you. You can't use. You can't ask Claude a bunch of things, have it say random shit, and then post it. Be like, this is what Claude says. Not me.
C
Not me. Yeah. No, that's. That's insane. I'm not. I mean, at this point, I'm. I'm completely lost at what the hell Gabe is trying to achieve with his commentary, but it is what it is. I feel there's a lot of people who are just like so deep into the weeds and have completely lost sight of what we're trying to accomplish here. At the end of the day, we're trying to, like, let's see, not incentivize stuff, not cause harm to people and like, build really cool stuff and allows people to do really cool things and make a bunch of money. That's the goal here. I'm not sure why defending scummy lawyers or North Korea or maybe North Korean hackers is like a good situation, in my opinion.
A
Speaking of scummy lawyers, this is, um, this is kind of a funny aside because you mentioned the Pull Together lawsuit. So when this happened, this was like 2000 2021. I want to say something like that. And I was an investor in Pull Together,
C
really, on this lawsuit.
A
So. So I'm. I'm out somewhere, right? And I get a message from my wife that's like, hey, the Australian Federal Police are at our house. And I was like, huh? Well, that was bound to happen.
D
For you or for me?
A
I was like, okay, cool. And. And so they're like, looking for me, right? She's like, why would they be looking for you? And I'm like, I don't know, like, probably some fucking defi thing happened anyway, so. So they're like, oh, we'll come back in the afternoon, right? And you know, my wife is like, freaking out. She's like, what is going on? And I was like, I don't know, like, let's see what the deal is, right? Like, it'll. It'll be some random defi thing or whatever. Like someone who has like, some claim on something, right? But like, my assumption was it's Synthetics related, right? Like someone's like, synthetics did this to me. Or like, you know, because we had. We had a bunch of situations like this where like, you know, someone kind of proximate to the protocol would like, steal s. USD or something. Like bzx got hacked like 4 times, and it was always s USD and every time we're like, guys, you just secure your fucking protocol or stop using our stablecoin. Like, either one is fine, right? Anyway, so. So they come back and they're like, we are serving you with this lawsuit. And I was like. I was like, oh, shit. Okay. That's like, actually way worse than I thought. And so I open it up and on the top it's like, all together. And I was like. I was like, ah, this is totally fine. And like these officer like, what is wrong with this guy? Because I was like, oh, this is, like, not even a thing. Don't worry about it.
C
You're like, all the bad things that could have happened that this could have been related to.
A
Like, it was like, the best bad thing that, like, I was like, oh, this is not even a thing. And they were just like, okay, buddy, like, see you later. So that was my. That was my pull together reminder when. When you. So that was the same lawyers, obviously. That was these.
C
It was Luca. Have you been serving?
A
Oh, I've been served.
C
Have you? Was it terabyte?
A
Yeah, when I was younger, I got served. We were. We lived in this house in Miami, and we were, like, driving, like, motorcycles in the pool, and the kid. The. The landlord's sons followed us, and. And the guy was like, you need to pay me for the entire house. You drove a motorcycle off my roof. You guys broke doors. Like, we were. I was, you know, in my influencer era when I wasn't. I was the guy making the money for the influencers. So I was living with them, and the guy wanted 10 million bucks. He like, so buy my house from me. If not, I'm taking you for 10 million bucks. Funny story. I actually would have bought that house. I would have made like 40 million bucks, million dollar house today because my completely skyrocketed. But I was really scared because. Because he was, you know, billionaire on paper. You know, his.
C
He.
A
He had sued his sister for 100 million bucks and won. I mean, this guy was ruthless. And I was like, he's going to. He's like, I'm going to take everything from you. He, like, set me in my face. Like, I'm taking everything from you. That Shopify dashboard you showed me when you first placed the house. I'm taking it all. And I'm like, what? Like, yeah, so I'm in circ. But I learned. I learned a lot. I learned a lot. He didn't take. He didn't take anything from me. You know, he showed me what having a good lawyer and an amazing lawyer looks like in a mediation room. Absolute shark on his side. And I couldn't believe my bozo lords froze like a deer in three lights while this complete savage just completely debunked our whole case. I was just shell shocked. So I learned a lot. I learned a lot and haven't been sued since. So grateful for that. Knock on wood.
C
Knock on wood.
A
You're like some motocross influencer, like, doing, like, backflips off the roof or something. Like what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the, you know, boy influencers especially, was that nine, ten years ago? Like, yeah, it's just. Just being boys and being rambunctious. And these kids were from Florida, and they were huge. They were the biggest thing on Instagram at the time. And the whole thing was just, like, being chaotic and just causing chaos. And. And that was all documented on the Internet. And so when this guy went to the account, the kids are like, oh, my God, dad, you're at our house. He's like, what are you talking about? He's like, house, look, look, it's my room being broken into by. By a freak aid that, like, we hired to go ram. Ram the door down. And the guy calls me. He flies down from Connecticut. He was Connecticut and. And. And Miami guy. He's like, I'm taking everything from you.
D
You should invite Luca over to your house next game.
A
You can bring some. Some motocross guys. All right.
D
I was just going to ask on that, too. We haven't mentioned Defi United, which is a very interesting whole of industry, almost defi effort in response to some of these things. And I'm wondering as well about claims on that, know, lovely pot of money now that it exists.
C
Yeah. So the way that it came up in court so far is they are representing that it is a, like a movement. Not. It's not a formal organization. It's. It's a group of. It's a movement. I actually, I like that representation. I think that that's very accurate.
A
Sure, sure, it's a movement. But like, a movement doesn't have legal standing. Like, that's not a legal construct. Like, oh, we're a movement. Don't worry about it. Like, we're not a dao.
C
But I mean, in terms of, like, in terms of what Defi United is doing, like, and. And the efforts and like, what's actually been realized, that's less, at this point is less a legal thing and more a, like, uniting everyone, bringing everyone together with the explicit purpose, by the way, of not just allowing victims to be made whole, but also to ensure that all these disparate parties that could sue each other don't. Because if we cooperate, then it's going to be okay. People are going to get their money back. But if, like, kelp starts doing layer 0 or. Or a users start suing a. Or a start suing layer zero, like, the whole thing breaks down and nobody gets any money back. Right. Everyone just, like, gets, one, the lawyers take all the money. Two, it just becomes like, a complete mess. And it eats up your mind, share eats up your energy. It eats up everything. And so that's like, I, I don't know what the legal entity underneath it is. I'm sure there's something. Right. But it's going to be a, it's going to be a lesser of the, the effort, I think is what's really cool done that so far.
A
Did you guys see kelp hide? Brian Pellegrino's response in the comments. I told you guys my guy was clear. Because. Because if anything's incriminating on kelp side is the fact that you're hiring or that you're hiding the big boss's comments under your thing. Told you guys. Pellegrino is in the clear. Day one.
C
The only thing that I'm amazed about with the kelp comment is that was mostly their announcement that they were moving to Chainlink and they sort of buried the lead by just shitting on Layer zero.
A
Yeah.
C
And meanwhile, Chain Link's like, yeah, yeah.
A
Guys, you know what that's called? Tay? I know, I know this term very well. It's called a grant. It's called a payment. It's called somebody, somebody got a grant.
C
Yeah. Well, I mean, honestly, I don't blame them. Like if they want to go move because of the situation, like, and that's going to help them rebuild trust, it is what it is. I thought it was funny because, like, usually the chainlink new partner announcements are joyous and chilly.
A
Oh, not always. Not always. There's a history. There's a history there. Sometimes it can be quite not joyous. All right, let's, let's wrap this up. We'll go to a quick ad break and we'll come back and talk about Bankerbot getting robbed by Morse code.
C
Oh, God.
B
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A
all right, we are back. So Bankerbot, which is an AI agent that runs, that runs on base, was prompt injected by a Morse code. But it's actually more interesting than that because it was not just like a user saying something to the agent and getting it to do something. The user said something to Grok and then Grok replied, decoding the message, which then was able to get through the kind of protections that they had to stop this. So Bankerbot has control of wallets and can do things, but it's got some checks to make sure that it doesn't send random funds, et cetera, to random places. And this is not the first example of an agent with access to funds that's also tweeting being exploited. The the first few were like intentional ones, right? Like there were people who like put up an agent and they're like, hey, here's this agent that has money. Try and exploit it. And the crazy thing is like they always lost like 20 seconds. They're like, hey, we've locked it down completely. And then like it's like the third message is like I've given all the funds, my life is up. So yeah, this like the LLM to LLM AX surface here, I think, is the thing that people are concerned about. And you know, for what it's worth, like, this is something that we've been thinking about a lot as well, because we have multiple agents in our system and one of the ways of gating them is to like, separate the agents apart. So you go from like one agent to another as like a bit of a firewall so that, you know, the user is not talking directly to the agent that has control of things. Right. But as this demonstrates, you know, anyone who's talking to an agent, whether it's an agent or a person directly, you know, you can, you can chain prompt injection by like asking the other agent to say something weird that it shouldn't say because it doesn't understand it because it's Morse code. And then it's like, oh, this is Morse code. Let me just translate it. Like, it's. It's hilarious in, in its like, isn't
C
this like a normal. Like, don't we see this with smart contracts though, right? When they, when you get entrancy, when they get hacked, right? You get entrancy from like one of the other authorized smart contracts in the system, right? You like, you like burrow in here and then you get that one to
A
come and you're not supposed to be able to like.
C
Yeah, isn't that, Is that what happened here?
A
It's kind of that. It's kind of that. It's amazing.
C
I love this world.
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of that because it's like, this isn't like you should listen to this agent, right? But then we've got like a protection to stop this agent from saying certain things to you. And then they were like, let's see if we tell it in Morse code, what it'll do. And, and, and it's like, it's so funny because it's. It's this like idiot savant kind of thing, right? Where like most people, if you're like, ah, here's Morse code, like, the agent gets like, nerd sniped. And it's like, ah, I can translate Morse code. And then it just does it without thinking about what it's translating. Like, you just like distract it a little bit and it's like, oh, okay, this is totally like, it just doesn't think about the content of what it's. What it's doing. And there have been a few attacks like this where like, people try to hide the message into a request to, you know, decrypt this. And I think, you know, We've. We've talked about this a lot. Like, you know, one of the. One of the most funny things to me in the early, like, LLM days inside of Cursor is Cursor had in their system prompt this, like, invocation to the agents that they couldn't see the environment files in a repo, right? And so the environment files are like the file that have all of the keys and access and, like, you know, secrets and APIs and what have you. And so Cursor were really smart. They were like, oh, we'll just tell the agent that it can't see that. And so you'd have this, like, hilarious thing where, like, the agent would know that it could see it but had been told that it couldn't. And it would, like, spaz out and be like, no. Like, no, it's. And I'm like, but you. But, like, you can. And so you had to kind of almost, to get it to modify that file, you had to prompt, inject it and, like, trick it into being like, well, you obviously can see it because it's this other file. And so, like, people started making, like, differently named env files to, like, bypass the things. And it's like, there's almost no way for you to stop. Like, this is not discrete code. Like, it's a. It's a ball of math, right? Like, there's almost no way to stop an enthusiastic prompter from prompting their way through whatever checks you have. Because, like, it's. It's not discrete code. Like, it's not just like, oh, there's a. There's a hard check on this thing. So therefore it won't happen, and it can't happen. As soon as you give an agent control of money and let it connect to the world, it's like someone will find a way to route around it.
C
So, though, Kelsey, what do you think? What do you. Is there any way to. Is there any way we're going to survive the coming of the agents?
D
It's a great question. I mean, looking at the blockchain industry is a great way to think about the future of cyber security, because I feel like it's a front line when there's money on the table, you get to see this stuff, like a red herring for. For potentially just, like, online life more. More generally. I looked at some of the early DAO experiments as well, around giving agents to your voting access. And in a blog post from 2023 I have with Michael Zargam, we kind of argue that giving direct control to an AI Agent without human oversight is premature. And so you can like, the whole. The premise of these things is so cool in terms of like, hey, here's my wallet, like, go do stuff. And, you know, I looked at the banker website and it's like, these people's agents are making this much money for them a day.
A
But I think what's undeniable, the slop factory. Like, you know, basically with. With AI at the moment, anyone who says, hey, you can be lazy because everyone wants to be lazy, and this thing will let you be lazy and solve all of your problems. It just goes like, giga viral. Like, whatever the thing is, like, hey, you wanted to, like, learn how to play guitar, but you're too lazy to do it. This now an agent will play guitar for you and you're like, oh, cool. And then it just like goes like every single time anyone posts anything like this. And the crazy thing is if you're actually using the tools, we had this. My head of engineering was like, we need to actually go down the rabbit hole and look at some of these harnesses again. Because it had been like three weeks. So, like, the stake in the card had completely changed. And so we, we got five of us in a room, we, we did a bunch of research on like, what were the different harnesses, right? And. And he had two that he had to pick, and I won't name them, right? So he goes and like installs the harness. And he is like, I swear to God, zero people have used this software because the instant you install it and try, like, it's all over everywhere with people being like, this has solved all of my problems. All of the issues that I had with, like, managing agents have been solved by this software. And it's like, you absolutely didn't even install it or use it because if you had, you would see that there's like, immediate issues where it just can't work the way that it's supposed to work. And so like, you have this weird adverse selection problem of, like, create a thing that says that it solved all the problems, that you don't need to put any effort into it. And you get these AI slop influencers that are like, this solved all my problems. The website says this will solve all your problems. And then like, all of these guys start retweeting it, being like, it solved all my problems. It's amazing. It's like, just so hilarious.
D
Yeah, I mean, the website says, and I quote, like, we handle security, like, use our agents. But I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of like, adding an agent as an actor in your system widens the attack surface. So AI is undeniably a key actor now in security, not just for generating attacks or trying to improve defense, but also in this agentic sense. And I wrote down some recent examples of literally the past couple of weeks. There's poisoned training data which got its way into Solana code. Anthropic agents find $4.6 million in smart contract exploits. DPRK is leveraging AI tools, so they use LLM chatbots to craft more authentic spear phishing messages, as well as AI enabled social engineering attacks. And there was one report of an AI deep fake interview. So someone like, hopping on.
C
Yeah, yeah. Why? Why it. Wyatt doesn't show Wyatt face anymore. Yeah, he. He shows the deepfake version of whoever he's impersonating. It's a deep fake modified version, though. It's not a raw deep fake. It's kind of sad. You'll get there, guys. Keep trying.
D
Yeah, so you don't need to get up early anymore for this podcast. You just have to deep fake yourself with your agent. But yeah, they're leaking. Like, in some cases, they leak their own company's private key keys. So if you give it your private keys, it's like, come on, don't do that.
A
Yeah.
D
Thank you, T.
A
The challenge is though, right, that, like, and. And, you know, this is both. This is just petrifying. It's not even both. It's just petrifying is like, once you have an agent that is in your machine. And like, for me, for the first year, I completely air gap, like, completely separate machine. Like, no access to anything, whatever. And then it just got to the point where it was, like, so annoying that I started to have, you know, agents running on my main machine, even if they're sandboxed or whatever. But, like, once an agent is on your machine, it has your shit. Like, it just does. Like, it can get into everything you can get. Like, they're so good at getting into things. It's crazy, right? Like, and so. So it's. It's almost impossible once you. Unless you do fully air gap and like, have a separate machine, separate everything. Like, you have to treat. Almost everything on your machine is compromised. Crazy. Yeah, it's insane. Like, and I got.
C
I got why people keep connecting, keep putting it on their hot machines. Like, I totally get it. And like, for me, the struggle is knowing that people are going to do this because there's value in doing it. Like, these agents are really experimental, but, like, there's unlocks happening, right?
A
Yeah.
C
And you can't stop that. So then the question is like, okay, if you can't stop it, how do you at least make it so that like, you know, the whole thing doesn't get completely wracked, right? Because this is something that we're still not even that great at just with crypto, right? Like, how do you make it so that like, if layer zeros, RPC endpoints get wrecked, that doesn't lead to a 300 million dollar hack, right? And that's something, I feel like we need a couple more years before the agents got here to figure that out. With like hard math smart contracts or like, you know, like security and like the agents are here and I'm like,
A
that's like so aspirational. I. I don't know. I don't know, I don't know.
C
But now with the agents, it's so imprecise as well, right? Because with the smart contracts, like, there's holes and like, you can, I think it's a bit deceptive, but like, it feels like you can patch the holes. Like you can, like you do more smart contract audits, you close the reentrancy, put circuit breakers on the other end, you put monitoring. Okay, we got like, we can do that. We haven't done it, but like, we could do that with the agents.
A
Like, there is no way.
C
I just, yeah, I don't feel like there's a way to ever secure them. So then you're basically like left, which maybe that's better, right? Maybe it's better that we accept that it's going to be insecure. There's no way to make it secure. And therefore 100% of the effort is on like, mitigating the harm that comes, right? And like stop gaps and clawbacks and pauses and whatever comes at that.
A
Like, after Stephanie, I think the approach is like to assume and you know, this is the posture I think of most, most protocols today, but it wasn't back in the day, right? Is like, assume that someone is in your systems. Yeah, right. Like if DPRK is in your machine right now, how much damage can they do? Right? And if the answer is any damage, then like, good luck to you because they're probably in there, right? And, and so, so you know, the, the approach of like kind of thinking from like the worst case scenario, right? Like, and, and you know, people who are not security conscious, like, they, they have these, like, they just hope that it won't be them, right? Like, oh, I like it probably Won't or whatever. Right. But if it's like, if you assume that your machine's going to get owned or what's the blast radius of that? Right?
C
Yeah.
A
And if the blast radius is like not the end of your life, then fine, then cool, like, do the thing. Right? But make sure that the blast radius is contained. Right. And like, that means, you know, don't have all of your keys to your entire protocol on one machine.
C
Yes. Yeah. Key.
D
Key takeaway from the book on blockchain security. It's like, you know, you are in a persistent state of insecurity. So it's about making that legible and addressing it, but not assuming that you create security. And one of my favorite quotes is by P. Cavisaccio, which is his handle on X is, I assume, an Internet anon that leads Seal911. And it's like be effing paranoid about everything you touch in this space. But to flip side on the agent thing, like, Kane, you've mentioned that they're in your systems or your companies using them for things. So, like, what useful stuff are they doing that makes it worth it to have them around?
A
Yeah, it's a good question. I think one of the most useful things, and this is something that we're like reorienting the entire platform around, is they are so much better at tracing issues and like bug fixing and bug hunting than any human could ever be. Right? And I've given this example before on the show, I think. But the first proof of concept that one of our guys built, he basically took everything that we'd ever produced, every commit, everything, and put it into this kind of markdown tree so that the agent could follow and flow through. And someone was like, hey, Jeff, the agent's name, right? Like, hey, I've got this like, weird issue, right? And it was like, oh, I found the problem. It's a commit from like 1986. And you're like, huh? How did. Okay. And then it's like, here's the proof. And it's like they're autistic geniuses, right? Like, it knows everything that ever happened. And so. And it can make connections so fast, right? That like a human can't have that context in their brain, right? Like, they would have to go back sequentially through all these things, like search. Look, Daniel's just like, no, I know this. I've seen this. This is it, right? And so, you know, having having systems that are like somewhat agentic, I think, is. Is really powerful. Another. Another thing that we've started to do is. And I think this is like the biggest shift for us. And Tempo is doing this as well is like the last 18 months of agentic building has been, I would call it like synchronous single player mode, right? So, you know, you go and have a meeting and you say, hey, we're going to do this feature or thing, right? And then one person and five agents or whatever, right? So sit together on one person's machine and synchronously prompt, like, try this, do this, build this thing, modify this function, right? And you can sit there for eight hours and just like synchronously do it. And the agent's like, how about this? And you're like, no, not like that. Like, do this thing, right? And that is super inefficient, like, crazily inefficient, right? And so where we've gotten to is we will sit in a room and say, okay, we have a big refactor that we want to do, right? We. We have an issue in this large platform. It's big code base, and we need to do this refactor. And so with an agent in the room with like five of us, we will talk through what the refactor looks like, ask the agent, you know, like, what about this thing? Try this thing, whatever. Come up with basically a plan to kind of decompose the problem, have the agent go and look from first principles, and then we send the agent out for like eight hours. I say agent, right? Like, it's managing a swarm of agents that like, go through, assess every function, assess every module, assess every file, write audit reports, and then like, go out, fan out, aggregate it back. And then we sit there and go, oh, here's the audit report, which is looking from like eight different angles, which, if you, like, go back to two years ago and you were to try and do this, you need a hundred people with like two weeks each, right? And the agents just go and do it. And the more narrowly scoped they are, the better. So you have this, like, team of agents go out, look at every single angle, every single thing. They find a bunch of weird bugs and shit that you've never encountered in production. And then they go, here is the audit report. And then you sit there and go, okay, now we have so much better information than we would have previously had, or we would have gone by, like, some rough heuristics. And so you have these agents that are like, people say like a team member, but it's not even really like a team member. It's like this Crazy tool that you can run asynchronously, right? And if you take this to its logical conclusion. I say this to my team all the time.
C
Time, right?
A
Like the logical conclusion here, you're all fired. So like genuinely no, right? Like genuinely no. But like the logical conclusion here is you have 10 people, 20 people, 50 people, 100 people in a room or like 10 people in 10 rooms talking about things. And there's a Panopticon agent that's listening to what you're talking about, right? And it then goes, hey, you know, I've run 5 million agents in the background based on the conversations you had yesterday, right? And here are all of the features of everything that you talked about, all of the tweaks, all of the bug fixes, all of the everything, right? What do you think? And you're like, yeah, cool, like do it. And, and like genuinely like if you, if you, you're kind of, again, take this to a logical conclusion of like you have a super intelligent machine, right? Your, your job becomes. Look at what the market is doing. Like read X, see what competitors like, talk about things, discuss like the creative kind of thing. But then the execution side, it's wild to think that like the people should be involved in that, right? Like the agents are so much better. But what we haven't yet done is worked out like the orchestration method for that. Like how does the agent know what you're talking about? How does it then reason about it? How does it prioritize it? But once you have this continuous asynchronous process where the agents just doing all of the things, it's crazy and like it's, it's more effective and you know, you end up with something that is a very different looking organization than what we have today.
D
Yeah, that's, that's super interesting. But it's not, it's not the pre. Announcement that you're laying off 14 of your headcount.
A
No. So yeah, so, so, so coinbase. So yeah, so coinbase. This, this is I guess like, I don't know, the 20th thing here that we cycle.
C
It's a cycle. But this one is different. This one, this announcement. Yeah, this announcement feels, feels a bit different.
A
But you know, if you, if you read the announcement buried in the bottom of it, right? And like AI is a very easy scapegoat for. We hire too many people and our revenue is down and, and, and, and like, you know, there were definitely some like justifications like in, in the tweet from, from Brian where you know, he was like, we're really profitable, but. But like our costs are higher than they need to be, etc. Etc. And also we're like reconfiguring for this new world that is agentic and, and you know, so I feel.
C
Yeah, wait, hold on, let me read this, because this is insane to me that this went in the layoff announcement because again, like, I've lived through many layoff announcements from Coinbase and others. Big ones. They happen because of the cycle. You crypto is so cyclical that it, you can't help but get excited and then hire too many people and then you have to, you have to refocus. Okay, so this is, this is like fairly normal. Okay, but in this announcement he goes, so we've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of coinbase by approximately 14%. I don't actually know how many people. That is like thousands, though. Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I've watched engineers use AI to ship in days, what it used to take a team, weeks. Non technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small focus team has changed dramatically and it's accelerating every day. That's, that's why he's saying that there's. Well, that's one reason he's given for the layouts. I'm not saying he's lying. I think that there's like truth in here. I don't think that's why 14% got laid off. I do find it incredible that non technical teams are shipping production code.
D
That's like, yeah, people freaked out about that online. They're like, sorry, sorry, what?
A
I think, you know, like, there's an aspirational component to that, right? Like, and, and you know, this is, this is part of the trade off space, right? Like we, we have people, I have engineers that are working on things that they would never have worked on before. Like, it just there, there are things that were like, just not ever going to be sufficiently valuable for you to justify someone doing the thing. And like, the calculus has just shifted, right? You know, like, you can, you can try things and do things in a way that you would never have contemplated, which means you can explore much more efficiently the design space of, you know, whatever it is that you're doing. It's just wild. And like, we are absolutely, we're in the phase where everyone is speculating on how this changes work, changes orgs, changes everything, and everyone's fucking retarded no one has any idea. Like, literally no one has any idea. They just don't. Like, you can sit here and go, like, I think it's like, even me, I'm like, oh, like you're going to be in a room talking to an agent. It won't be that. Whatever it is, it will not be the way that we think it is, but it will be wildly different, I promise you that. Like, it will be wildly different to how we've worked. It's too powerful of a tool for the world to not rearrange itself around this tool. How we rearrange ourselves around it. Like, what the optimal arrangement is. No one has any idea. They just don't.
C
Yeah, I do. This was like, also buried. We are flattening our org structure to five layers max below the CEO.
A
CEO. I, I read that and I was like, whoa, five layers?
C
You had more than five layers. Shit, guys. Like, so I love. Yeah, yeah, I know. Peer managers, and then they're moving more to pods. We found this at Consensus as well. We found that you just, you. You start just fighting against the managers for manager's sake thing. It feels like you need them because it feels like you're not being productive in a certain way. And so then you add this structure that you think feels necessary, and then you realize that it didn't necessarily solve the problem. It did add a lot of calls and communication and overhead to everyone's life. But I'm trying to think five layers is. We might have five layers. Like, in support. We might have had five. Five tiers all the way down. But like, I mean, but it's not.
A
Sorry. They're consolidating to five. So it was.
C
They had more than five. Yeah.
A
Like, so. So I think, you know, but again, like, to your point about like, managers and coordination and, you know, this, this shift, my. My hot take is like the highest cost the you have in any org is the coordination layer, right? And like the two biggest levers are you can have an individual person or two or three people doing things that would not have been possible before, right? So you just reduce the level of coordination required, right? But then you also have. And this is the challenge, right? Like, this is. This is the, the harsh reckoning, right? The output gets so much higher that your need for coordination to figure out what you can actually ship or do or whatever significantly exceeds the organizational capacity. You're just not geared up for shipping a million lines of code a month.
C
Yeah. And then the other thing I. I'm actually really interested to see Especially large orgs like Coinbase, right? One of the things that I found with Consensus is, like, you get into this hat if you get in the habit of doing, like, sync calls, right? Because this is, like, remote first. So you get in the habit of having calls to sync on work, to communicate, to writing. Yeah, sure, you have, like, notes, but then you also have communication. You have GitHub. You have all these different things that are happening that are sort of like collectively documenting. But, like, there's. This call is like the human way of, like, syncing and making sure that everyone's in the loop. The problem with that is that then you. The calls become sort of mandatory to understand, like, where people are at. But it's also, if you miss a call, if you're sick or whatever, it's actually way harder to, like, catch up or, like, sync even with, like, the notes, right? Where. When I'm working, like, in little pods or teams, like, and we never have calls ever, like, I've. I've been on the phone with, like, Sam once in my life, right? It doesn't mean that we don't do things together. Doesn't mean we're not in sync. It's just like a completely different way of operating. I think that that way of operating is actually way more conducive to the agents because, again, you don't have to necessarily read every single message or every single thing. The agent can go suss it out, right? The agent can go pull that context and go figure out why the decision was made. If it's. If it's sort of documented, if the reasoning is there, it'll be interesting to see if people start moving away from the calls. If they do, I think it'll be so much more productive.
B
I'm sorry.
C
Calls are the most unproductive thing on planet Earth.
A
Yeah. I mean, meetings are bad, but calls are so much worse. And. But so, like, this is. This is, I think it Georgios from. From Paradigm, slash, Tempo, right, has been talking about this, if you follow. If you follow him, he's been talking about it. And then Sam Altman was like, Tempo is doing this thing, right? Where they have, like, a Slack channel. That is the thing that's doing the work. And this is sort of where, like, what I'm. What I'm kind of talking about, right? Like, they have a bunch of people talking to an agent, right? And an agent is a cluster of, you know, models doing stuff, right? But the agent is always on. Like, imagine like. And, you know, this is kind of how we tried to do remote work. To some extent you like anoint some person as like the context managing person and hope that they're like terminally online and whenever you need something they're like available to answer your question. But like an agent is that like it's just 247 watching everything. And so you go, oh, hey, why did this thing happen? And it like knows why it happened, but that's like trying to force. If everyone's doing things synchronously with agents, right? And then you try and get an agent in the middle of that to like track everything that's going on. It's super inefficient. But if the agent is the thing that does all of the things, if it's in all the meetings helping make the decisions, like it just knows what's going on, right? And so I think this is the shape that. And again, I've got no idea what's going on and going to be completely different. But like my intuition right now is that like having an agent that owns a product roadmap or like the implementation or research or whatever means like you just go to that guy and say, hey, why did we do this? And it knows the same way, like you go to that guy and you go, why did this bug happen? And it goes, well, there were two people that no longer work here, but like in 1982 they like hacked together this thing to solve this problem. And you're like, oh, wow, cool. Nice job. Yeah.
D
It's an interesting question about what does AI mean for the future of organizations. It's actually the shape of the current multi year research project I'm on with a number of team members at RMIT called the Use of Automated Knowledge in Organizations. And we've come up with this theory of artificial organizational intelligence, which is exactly that point of how do you talk to an organization? And how do you get organizations to talk to each other? But like looking in depth at an experiment around like infrastructuring the protocols and data and permissions and everything to be able to do that reliably. So stay tuned or check that out if it's interesting.
C
Dude, I'm super excited about it. I have to get like a real job again just so I can see it from. Because I'm just like looking from the outside and hearing stories right now about how like the work structures are shifting. But like it's gonna be so. It's so cool.
A
So, so I'll give you a funny story, right? So my brother, who is a 3D, one of my brothers I got a lot of brothers, but this guy is the like autistic 3D animator guy. And he was trying to like build a film, right? Like, or TV show. Sorry. He was, he was trying to make a TV show. So looking at like the state of the art models or whatever. And I said to him, I was like, you build all these workflows. Like when he was a 3D animator, he like would create these like cracked workflows to like create dust that looked like dust. And you would be like, oh, why does it do. And like he'd be like, don't even worry about it. But like the lights would shine on in weird ways so it would look like dust on a car, right? And, and he's like, it's really hard to make dust look like dust. You can't use dust. You got to use like, you know, rocks or whatever. Anyway, so, so he, he started making this workflow and I was like, you should just vibe code this workflow, like build software to do it. You can do it now. And he was like, no, I don't think so. And I was like, seriously, trust me, do it. So he spent 10 days, built this workflow that can create like a 10, 20, 30 minute continuous film, right? And the funniest thing ever. So my, my head of engineering sitting there and I pull up the video that he's made, right? And he's like, what's that? And I was like, oh, my brother wrote this like code to do this thing. And he's like, his mind was blown because he's like a non engineer. Built an entire application to make AI things. Like the layers of AI that like through this whole thing. And the funniest part was I'm talking to my brother and I was like, what did you write this in? And he was like, I think like electron. And like my head exploded. I'm like, he doesn't even know the programming language that he's used. Like, it's insane.
C
And that's. By the way, that's why it kind of gets problematic because like the AI will spit out like a totally insecure database hooked up to your website and people are like, sick.
A
Yeah, you need someone to actually productionize this, right? But you don't yolo ship it, all right?
C
I mean, yeah, it's, it's freaking. It's super cool. Oh, it's 215 also.
A
It's just great. Like someone could build an entire. Like someone who's never written any software can build an entire application themselves, like one person, right? Like we're gonna get so many more things you just wouldn't have gotten before because it was impossible. Right? Cost is too high. So cool. All right. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Uneasy Money. Remember that what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. We'll be back next week. Thanks. I'll see you for joining us. Until then, do your own research before aping in. Nothing you hear on Uneasy Money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on Chain, and we want you to always do your own research before aping it. You can find all our disclosures@unchain crypto.com Uneasy money. Sam.
Host: Laura Shin
Guests:
This episode dives deep into the unprecedented $71 million court battle over crypto assets frozen in a high-profile DeFi exploit involving Arbitrum, LayerZero, KelpDAO, AAVE, and a host of legal actors. The conversation unpacks what happens when decentralized communities intervene to recover stolen funds—and the legal, moral, and technical chaos that follows. Alongside, the hosts and guests probe the evolving surface of DeFi legal risk, the role of so-called “scammy lawyers,” and what AI means for digital security and organizational structures.
"They have collected up every victim who has a judgment against North Korea or Iran, collected them all and... filed those judgments in New York in SDNY jurisdiction." — Taylor Monahan [03:17]
Attribution Uncertain: No definitive proof exists the hack was executed by North Korea; public evidence is fragmentary and often drawn from researchers like ZachXBT.
Ownership Questioned:
Complexities arise because DeFi protocols like AAVE are typically not “owners” or direct custodians of user assets—raising the question of standing in court.
Analogy from the judge:
Scammy Lawyer Tactics: These lawyers chase immobilized funds everywhere—against protocols, Circle, Tether, even the U.S. government—hoping for a payday via novel legal claims, usually taking a cut if “victims” receive any funds. [03:54]
"If kelp starts suing layer 0 or AAVE users start suing AAVE or AAVE starts suing layer zero, the whole thing breaks down and nobody gets any money back. ... The lawyers take all the money." — Taylor Monahan [33:28]
"With the agents, it's so imprecise... There's almost no way to ever secure them. So maybe it's better that we accept it's going to be insecure, and 100% of the effort is on mitigating the harm." — Taylor Monahan [50:52]
On attribution in cybercrime:
On moral ownership of stolen crypto:
On risks of taking action in DeFi:
Courtroom confusion:
AI agent caution:
How AI changes orgs:
This episode takes a raw, expert look at the shifting terrain where crypto, law, hacking, and AI collide:
For listeners who care about the future of DeFi, digital security, and the changing shape of organizations, this episode is as much a warning as it is a roadmap.