The blockchain was never the weak point in crypto's biggest-ever hack, says Morten Myrstad in this week's Kaupr Weekly. The weak point is permission — who holds it, who grants it, and how far it reaches.
Kaupr Weekly is a short podcast with Morten Myrstad on the long-term trends in onchain finance, fintech, stablecoins and the future of payments.
An attacker took control of the world's largest crypto exchange in under an hour on 29 October and got away with $6.3 billion — more than double the previous record theft in crypto history.
The blockchain was never the weak point in the biggest hack in crypto history. Neither was quantum computing, and neither were the AI agents themselves. The weak point is permission — who holds it, who grants it, and how far it reaches. That is Morten Myrstad's read on the Binance hack in this week's Kaupr Weekly.
How the attacker got in, Kaupr has covered in a separate piece on Torstein Thinn's reconstruction: no private key ever left Binance — it was the system that approves signatures that was hijacked.
Borg Security in Trondheim puts the same thing in architectural terms: the industry tests its smart contracts hard, and pays far less attention to the layer above them — the APIs, the backend servers, the wallet integrations. The money is well protected where it technically sits, but access to it runs through a much thinner wall. That weakness is not unique to blockchain projects.
And where this is heading is not what the critics are describing. Traditional finance is not standing outside pointing at the wreckage — in the same week as the hack, DTCC, the settlement giant behind the US securities market, took its tokenisation service from pilot into full commercial operation.
Sources: Kaupr Weekly, Kaupr
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