Matrix

I am worried that this week's cybersecurity crisis is the beginning of a new bearish narrative for crypto. The early version of this narrative was "AI breaks crypto" - a concern that cryptographic primitives used in major protocols would be broken by automated research. At the time, I thought this fear was mostly overblown, and so far the market seems to have agreed. However, a slightly different version now seems plausible: "AI breaks crypto exchanges." There are hundreds of billions in digital assets sitting in the centralized custody of major exchanges. This is the juiciest target for hackers anywhere on the internet. I think there is a high probability that in the next few months, a top ten exchange loses billions of dollars of customer assets. If this happens, there will be a small immediate selloff as we've seen after past hacks. But it will also likely kick off a new narrative: that further hacks are only a matter of time, and that all assets on centralized exchanges are fundamentally insecure. Crypto's best path through the coming months is to define itself *positively* with respect to AI - for example, "crypto is the financial layer for agents." But if the main AI-related narrative that sticks to crypto is *negative* - like "crypto exchanges are the biggest losers in the cybersecurity apocalypse" - then we're in for a rough winter.