Machine Earning: Exploring Agentic Finance On-chain

David, do you want to kick us off? Sure.

So

yesterday afternoon, it appears that Binance's hot wallets got hacked to the tune of...

I think right now the number stands at a little over six billion dollars.

And you know, this definitely looks like it's the biggest hack ever in crypto.

What's interesting about this is that a lot of the funds that were hacked were actually able to be frozen.

So it looks like roughly half of the hacked funds have been frozen.

by the stablecoin issuers and by certain networks.

So Arbitrum, which is an L2, I think is a particularly interesting case where they were able to sort of congregate all the relevant parties and freeze funds on the network.

With stablecoins, it's one thing because the issuers have admin controls on the token contracts and can swiftly freeze funds but with some of these networks it takes a lot more coordination to pull something like this off so it was interesting to see which networks have the ability to rapidly coordinate and freeze funds just goes back to the ethos of the space like obviously we have a range of call it immutability across lots of different networks where some networks can coordinate to freeze and other networks it's impossible

one thing that i found particularly

interesting about it was the speed that the stablecoin issuers froze funds so in past high profile like large exchange hacks certain issuers have taken much longer to freeze and waited for a court order or some type of legal justification to freeze whereas yesterday's incident all of the big issuers froze funds immediately so binance is saying that they are going to cover all the lost funds i believe they've already sort of begun the process of doing that and we're still waiting on like a full post-mortem from binance so we don't know exactly what went down binance has stated that it was a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop.

But I think it's probably best to wait and get their full technical write up on exactly what went down.

And then there's also the question of AI.

I think everybody is very curious of whether or not AI played a role in this or not.

And I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

I don't think we have any evidence one way or the other yet.

So yeah, speaking of AI, I think that's a good segue into the second part of our show.

So Matt, I'll pass it back to you.

Yeah, yeah.

I think we can get some more optimistic scenarios and themes here.

But I mean, the first thing I will say is I think you mentioned the stablecoin issuers freezing funds very quickly.

I did notice that in the press releases, both Circle and Tether said that they were coordinating with law enforcement.

So it does seem like potentially they're carving a clear path to they see what looks like an exploit.

They involve law enforcement early and they act quickly.