Unchained

A bridging bug cost NEAR Intents $3.8 million. Alex Shevchenko reveals how a coded tweet and a Signal invite encrypted with the attacker's key got the funds back.

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Quick favor: We're deciding what Unchained does next; new shows, stream times, what's worth paying for.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Our listener survey⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ takes five minutes, it's anonymous, and I read the write-in answers myself. Everyone who takes it can enter a drawing for a free year of Unchained Premium or Bits + Bips Premium. Open through Sunday, October 18.

— Laura

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NEAR Intents halted services after an attacker exploited a bug in its Omni bridging infrastructure and walked off with $3.8 million. Twelve hours after announcing the hack, the team tweeted at the suspect: "We have identified you, sir."

Alex Shevchenko, GM of NEAR Intents, joins Laura Shin to walk through how the attacker got the protocol to credit USDT deposits on BNB Chain that never happened, why NEAR Intents covered the loss from its own pockets, and how a Signal invite encrypted with the attacker's public key opened a private channel that ended with the funds coming back, partly in XMR.

He also lays out how Shield, NEAR Intents' detection system, kept 99% of the more than $50 million tied to the Bitget hack from passing through, and why he thinks shielded Zcash could face Monero's fate.

His argument: crypto that protects thieves can never become the economic backbone its builders want.

Host:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained

Guest:

⁠Alex Shevchenko - GM of NEAR Intents

Timestamps

🚨 01:43 How an Omni bridging bug let an attacker fake deposits and drain $3.8M

🌐 02:37 What NEAR Intents is, and how it relates to NEAR Protocol and near.com

⚙️ 05:01 How the hack worked and how the identified that it had occurred

💧 09:51 1inch Aqua: Back multiple positions with one token balance at https://1inch.com/aqua

🚔 10:55 Law enforcement, and how NEAR Intents identified a suspect within 12 hours

🔐 17:51 The Penn and Teller playbook: a Signal invite only the attacker could decrypt

🏎️ 22:52 Why Alex says a bug bounty beats hacking, Lambo included

🛡️ 26:24 Shield: how NEAR Intents kept 99% of Bitget hack funds off the protocol

⚖️ 32:07 Does blocking stolen funds make NEAR Intents centralized? Alex says no

🕶️ 40:17 Can shielded Zcash stay clean, or will it follow Monero's path?
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Live from TOKEN2049 in Singapore, Haseeb, Tom, and Tarun sit down with Balaji Srinivasan and Arthur Hayes.

Welcome to The Chopping Block, where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week they are live on the BingX Stage at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, joined by Balaji Srinivasan and Arthur Hayes.

Balaji explains why Network School moved its headquarters to Kazakhstan, which he calls Singapore with space to build, and why courting a country works a lot like enterprise sales when half of all countries have fewer than 10 million people. Then OpenAI drops 700 AI-written math papers and Justin Drake tells crypto to go into bunker mode: Tarun separates theoretical attacks from practical ones, Balaji proposes a social smart contract that would let chains rewind after a cryptographic break, and Arthur pitches the Flop Network as food for AI agents. Finally, Blast and Abstract shut down, nobody booked Marquee this year, and the panel debates whether the L2 era was a necessary search or crypto's version of Chinese ghost cities.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Show highlights

🔹 TOKEN2049 is still the one retail mega conference left, even in the first year with no wrapped Lambo out front.

🔹 Balaji says crypto is M&A-ing Western institutions, and that anything holding long-dated Treasuries is wrecked.

🔹 Network School has moved its headquarters to Kazakhstan, which Balaji calls Singapore with space to build: 21 million people, a tie with China and India at the physics Olympiad, about 40% of the world's uranium, and room for 10,000 acres of Arthur Hayes City.

🔹 More than 10 countries bid for Network School. Balaji says courting governments works like enterprise sales, because half of all countries have under 10 million people and a billion dollars goes a long way there.

🔹 Why Hollywood misleads you about the rest of the world, from Borat to Squid Game, and why Balaji splits countries into a descending world and an ascending world.

🔹 The ascending world has murals of Elon and will build Arthur a statue, preferably on a horse, while blue states drive their billionaires out.

🔹 OpenAI drops 700 AI-written math papers with nothing on cryptography, and Justin Drake tells crypto to go into bunker mode by moving funds to addresses that have never signed.

🔹 Tarun says there is still a big gap between a theoretical attack and a practical one, and Haseeb asks who will even tell us when ECDSA is broken.

🔹 Balaji proposes a social smart contract that lets a chain rewind after a cryptographic break, Haseeb says cross-chain dependencies make that far harder than it was five years ago, and Balaji warns that anti-tech is the new anti-capitalism.

🔹 Tom says to watch what people do rather than what they say, and Balaji argues there are hard mathematical bounds on what AI can do.

🔹 Tarun on quantum money, Balaji on blockchains that spend their own token budget trying to hack themselves, and Arthur on the Flop Network as food for AI agents.

🔹 Blast and Abstract shut down, and Arthur reports that Marquee, fully booked all week last year with half a million Singapore dollar minimum spends, has not had a single booking this year.

🔹 Balaji says every failed L2 was part of a search worth running, Arthur jokes that it was all a search for Base and Robinhood Chain, Tarun calls the L2s Chinese ghost cities that can at least be demolished, and Haseeb tallies the middlemen that make running one so expensive.

Hosts

⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly

⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures

Guests

⭐️Balaji Srinivasan, Founder of Network School

⭐️Arthur Hayes, CIO of Maelstrom & CEO of Flop Labs

Disclosures
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Justin Drake told holders not to panic. Ben DiFrancesco says if AI weakens elliptic curves, the clock is how fast Chinese models catch up.

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Quick favor: We’re deciding what Unchained does next; new shows, stream times, what’s worth paying for.

⁠⁠Our listener survey⁠⁠ takes five minutes, it’s anonymous, and I read the write-in answers myself. Everyone who takes it can enter a drawing for a free year of Unchained Premium or Bits + Bips Premium. Open through Sunday, October 18.

— Laura

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OpenAI released 722 math papers, and Justin Drake followed with a "don't panic" tweet suggesting large holders consider moving funds, setting off a wave of speculation that elliptic curve keys might soon be easier to brute force.

Ben DiFrancesco, Founder and CEO of ScopeLift, joins Kain Warwick, Taylor Monahan, and Austin Griffith to separate rumor from risk. DiFrancesco puts low odds on the rumors but argues crypto would get hit first, patch fastest, and could leave traditional finance as the worse place to hold money, with Chinese open-weight models setting the clock. Monahan untangles the 0.36 ETH MetaMask staking incident that got pulled into the speculation.

They also cover ZachXBT's undercover investigation of a DPRK money launderer, the NEAR Intents hacker sending funds back, and a push for Swiss authorities to intervene at Safe. DiFrancesco closes with a warning for token teams: the regulatory excuse for skipping value return is going away.

Hosts:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Host of Uneasy Money and Founder of Infinex and Synthetix

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Co-host of Uneasy Money and Security Expert

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Austin Griffith⁠⁠⁠ - Co-host of Uneasy Money and Builder Enablement at Ethereum Foundation

Guest:

⁠Ben DiFrancesco - Founder and CEO of ScopeLift

Timestamps

🔐 01:57 Why Justin Drake’s ‘don’t panic’ tweet has crypto eyeing its cryptography

🦊 06:12 Taylor on the MetaMask staking incident and the 0.36 ETH that tipped it off

🧮 14:03 Ben on why even a worst-case ECC break wouldn’t mean instant theft

🏦 20:04 Why Ben thinks TradFi, not crypto, could be the worse place to hold money

🤖 25:02 How AI models went from flubbing 2+2 to formalizing hard math

💧 30:45 1inch: See how LPs can back multiple positions with one token balance at http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-yt

🔙 31:49 How the NEAR Intents hacker ended up sending the money back

🕵️ 37:07 ZachXBT went undercover with a DPRK money launderer: what he found

😤 51:25 Why instant outrage is the tell for launderers and Sybil farmers

🏗️ 56:11 From Gnosis’s 2017 ICO to Safe, the multisig securing $100B+

⚖️ 01:02:23 The push for Swiss intervention at Safe and what it actually claims

🗳️ 01:08:12 Ben on how regulatory fear warped DAOs and why value return matters now

🧱 01:17:12 Blast and Abstract shut down: too many L2s, and never build a wallet
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In this spicypost-Bitget hack debate, THORChain co-founder Chad Barraford says the protocol can't block laundering. Taylor Monahan points to the halts it has used before.

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Quick favor: We're deciding what Unchained does next; new shows, stream times, what's worth paying for.⁠⁠⁠⁠ Our listener survey⁠⁠⁠⁠ takes five minutes, it's anonymous, and I read the write-in answers myself. Everyone who takes it can enter a drawing for a free year of Unchained Premium or Bits + Bips Premium. Open through Sunday, October 18.

— Laura

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The Bitget hack reignited a fight on crypto Twitter: should chains that can stop North Korea from laundering stolen funds actually do it? THORChain, which DPRK hackers keep using to reach Bitcoin, landed at the center of it.

Chad Barraford, co-founder of THORChain, argues the protocol cannot respond fast enough without redesigning it to be more centralized. Security expert Taylor Monahan counters that THORChain has acted before when its own protocol was at risk, and that routes made up almost entirely of stolen funds could simply be switched off.

Laura Shin presses on the closed-source signing library, four operators running 39 nodes, why validators left after Bybit, ZachXBT's undercover look at a launderer pitching THORChain, Tornado Cash-style legal risk, and fee spikes after the KelpDAO and Bitget hacks.

Barraford's answer to the biggest hypothetical is simple: if enough node operators want to block laundering, it gets blocked.

Host:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained

Guests:

Taylor Monahan - Security Expert and Co-host of Uneasy Money

Chad Barraford - Co-founder of THORChain

Timestamps

⚖️ 01:56 The Bitget debate: should chains that can block laundering do it?

🧱 04:10 Why Taylor says THORChain has been 'making this excuse' for years

⏸️ 10:48 THORChain paused for 5 weeks for itself. Why not for stolen funds?

🪙 19:15 1inch Aqua: See how LPs can back multiple positions with one token balance at http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-yt

🏦 20:15 Is THORChain an intermediary? The custody critique of its TSS vaults

🚪 24:32 Why did validators leave after Bybit? Chad and Taylor disagree

🧪 39:36 Does THORChain pass Chad's own decentralization litmus test?

🕵️ 47:59 ZachXBT's undercover probe: a launderer's 'Thor cross-chain' pitch

🏛️ 57:24 Could THORChain face a Tornado Cash-style case? Chad's legal defense

🛡️ 01:05:05 NEAR's Shield stopped $50M in laundering. Could THORChain copy it?

💸 01:05:57 Does THORChain profit from stolen funds? The fee spike debate
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SPONSORED CONTENT: This video is a paid partnership with Nexo. It was produced in collaboration with Nexo and is separate from Unchained's editorial coverage.

Nexo is a digital asset wealth platform offering yield products and crypto-backed lines of credit.

Join Nexo and get up to $5,000 in rewards. Terms apply. Geo-restrictions, eligibility and terms apply. https://ref.nexo.com/_5MiOg41

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A new report revealed that affluent investors aren't using crypto to build wealth. Nexo US COO Neil Steinhardt explains how the platform aims to fix that.

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About two-thirds of the affluent investors Nexo surveyed own crypto, but fewer than 5% have fully integrated it into how they build long-term wealth, according to the company's new report, The Future of Digital Wealth.

Neil Steinhardt, COO of Nexo US, walks host Ryan S. Gladwin through the report's Crypto Integration Index and why he says friction, not conviction, is holding investors back. He covers why Argentina has the highest ownership but the lowest integration, and how incoming regulatory clarity has brought Nexo back to the US.

Steinhardt also details how Nexo's crypto-backed credit lines work, what he heard from advisors at a registered investment advisor conference, and why a $35 trillion to $106 trillion wealth transfer could land with a generation that has high conviction in digital assets.

He closes on why he thinks CeFi lenders, which he says outpaced DeFi lenders for the first time in Q2, are positioned for the convergence of TradFi and crypto.

Host:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ryan S. Gladwin - Freelance Journalist

Guests:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Neil Steinhardt - COO of Nexo US

Timestamps

🔎 01:04 Why Neil says friction, not conviction, keeps crypto out of wealth plans

🧮 02:48 Inside Nexo's Crypto Integration Index

🌎 05:01 Other factors preventing crypto from integrating into wealth plans

🤝 06:50 How Nexo fixes friction in wealth building

⚖️ 08:27 How incoming regulatory clarity has brought Nexo back to the US

💳 10:15 How Nexo's crypto-backed credit lines work

👵 15:06 The coming wealth transfer to a generation with high crypto conviction

🏛️ 18:03 Investment advisors aren't advocating for crypto, here's how to change that

🏎️ 19:31 Nexo's card program and why Neil says wealth means experiences

📈 22:35 Why CeFi lenders outpaced DeFi lenders in Q2
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